Microsoft UE-V

[BKGarry]

Hello fellow edugeekers,

 

After dealing with one of those lovely windows updates that makes you have to rebuild your mandatory profile in order to make the student login time acceptable again, I decided enough was enough and started some research. Almost 5 years ago all users had roaming profiles, but we ended up with constantly having to reset profiles to get over issues with drives not mapping at times and GPOs not applying so we moved all of our students to mandatory profiles, which is fine most of the time.

 

I have recently stumbled on documents about UE-V, which seems that it could be amazing. I am toying with the idea of removing all profiles from AD and using this, so that there is a new local profile on machines when they first login and then using UE-V to allow settings to follow the user.

 

I am looking at doing this for everyone, as years 9-11 and staff have their own laptop assigned to them and 7-8 and 6th form have pools of laptops to share.

 

I would turn on the GPO setting to delete profiles that haven't been accessed in x amount of days to be deleted on restart.

 

After looking through the forums I didn't find a definitive thread on this so thought I would start one.

 

Has anyone taken the plunge into UE-V, as I think it will speed up login times greatly and the ability to reset just one section will be awesome.

 

Would be great to hear your views and experiences on this, as roaming and mandatory profiles are so old hat now and this looks really good.

[DMcCoy]

Remember it will need software assurance (which you get with OVS-ES) and MDOP licences (which is an extra). You also get App-V with MDOP which is worth investigating at the same time.

[BKGarry]

Good point, don't suppose you have indication of cost of the EEs agreement?

[DMcCoy]

Good point, don't suppose you have indication of cost of the EEs agreement?

 

Unfortunately not sure how much MDOP is on EES, I had it on Schools agreement and haven't seen anyone get it on EES yet, however it was only £2 or so on that).

[BKGarry]

Hopefully it is around £2/3 on EES. emailed out supplier.

[BKGarry]

Well for future reference, MDOP is cheap, £2.30 per FTE. Head has authorised getting it as well after our mandatory profile for students corrupted and caused login times to go from 1min 30 over wireless to almost 20 mins.

 

Better get researching ay. And App-V may be the perfect way of supplying more apps for our computing students.

[sister_annex]

APP-V is nothing short of brilliant, although, with V5 make sure you read up fully on the powershell stuff as they removed a lot of the client functionality that was in v4.6

 

as for UE-V IIRC there is a lot of configuration that has to go in to it and from my point of view not really had time to look into to it with everything else that seems to drop on my table...

 

The whole MDOP pack is pretty epic if time is taken to implement it properly - time we don't have at the moment unfortunately

[BKGarry]

In your personal opinion, is it worth App-V'ing the Visual Studio free products for the computing students to use?

 

I have python running locally for them, but I think they need something beefier. Need to read up on the whole MDOP properly. I have the feeling DaRT may come in very useful.

 

UE-V does look like it needs some config, but xml files and the way it works seems a lot more efficient than the Roaming and Mandatory profile mix we have at the moment.

[sister_annex]

We app-v everything we can... even SIMS which when we have nearly 600 clients to update makes life so much easier (update the main package, advertise on server next time program is launched on client voila updated)

 

One thing to check is whether the package you are creating requires drivers as these dont app-v too well otherwise I haven't found anything much that doesn't play well with app-v

[BKGarry]

Ooooooo Better read what I need server side.