Roaming Profiles?

[hipsterdoofus]

Hello all, I use Roaming Mandatory Profiles on my public access computers. Our staff computers currently host their own files, which I know is not best case. We have been trying to determine the base way to set up their files so that they can access them from multiple computers. I was curious how others may do that in their environment.

 

To add an additional caveat, we fairly recently started using office 365 and I had considered the possibility of simply using OneDrive for user's files and thus not even hosting them ourselves. Any thoughts on that either?

[Pete10141748]

Each member of staff has a folder on my file server called [[username]].

 

They then have a mapped drive U:\ mapped to \\servername\staffwork\[[username]]

 

Their Documents folder is redirected to the drive U:\, similarly folders like Music are redirected to U:\My Music, Pictures to U:\My Pictures and so on.

 

On their own laptop the U:\ drive is set to be available offline so they can use it ouside of school. If they log on to another machine, they get access to their work but it doesn't have to be downloaded or sycn'd to the machine first.

[aarono]

Each member of staff has a folder on my file server called [[username]].

 

They then have a mapped drive U:\ mapped to \\servername\staffwork\[[username]]

 

Their Documents folder is redirected to the drive U:\, similarly folders like Music are redirected to U:\My Music, Pictures to U:\My Pictures and so on.

 

On their own laptop the U:\ drive is set to be available offline so they can use it ouside of school. If they log on to another machine, they get access to their work but it doesn't have to be downloaded or sycn'd to the machine first.

 

I am also having issues with roaming profiles, our main issue is with corruption. I am currently testing the above with an account but the desktop background image doesn't roam. I am not too bothered by the background images however I am concerned about what else might not be roaming that is not at first obvious.

 

Pete10141748 have you experienced any issues with the background images or any other settings not roaming?

[Pete10141748]

It sounds like the picture file for the background is not being picked up from the AppData folder. By default in windows 7 the picture for the background image goes in C:\users\[[username]]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows Photo Viewer\ so I'd guess that is not being transferred to the server with the profile info on logoff.

 

Do you redirect the AppData folder to somewhere on the server?

 

Maybe try doing that and see what happens?

[hipsterdoofus]

Yeah someone in our office played some with redirection. I believe what he found was that redirecting docs was pretty simple, but redirecting app data was kind of a mess.

[aarono]

It sounds like the picture file for the background is not being picked up from the AppData folder. By default in windows 7 the picture for the background image goes in C:\users\[[username]]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows Photo Viewer\ so I'd guess that is not being transferred to the server with the profile info on logoff.

 

Do you redirect the AppData folder to somewhere on the server?

 

Maybe try doing that and see what happens?

 

We redirect all the folders including the AppData folder.

 

If I give the user a network profile in AD, their fully redirected profile keeps the background image wherever they login. If I remove the profile in AD (so they only have a local profile with all roaming folders redirected to their home directory) the background image does not roam. It is very confusing.

[Davit2005]

Haven't used roaming profiles for years. Documents, Desktop, Pictures is redirected but only last couple of months have had AppData redirected, no problems so far touch wood.

 

Pretty sure it is possible to exclude specific folders from redirection if needed.

[hipsterdoofus]

Perhaps my roaming profiles title was misleading I guess. Main goal is to allow access to files easily from multiple computers. I believe roaming profiles would encompass more of everything - where the entire profile is downloaded on logon, which would indeed be slow.