GPO - Making all student accounts look towards one roaming profile

[Ripleys]

Before I started working here, an outsourced company was hired to install a suite of computers for the music department. They blocked the inheritance off of our GPOs and had some of their own configured. I have been looking through and noticed one policy inparticular.

 

"Set roaming profile path for all users logging onto this computer" - This is set to "\\DC\music-profile$\pupils"

 

When looking into the directory I noticed there was only one profile being used; I assumed it was just going to create and dump a load of user account profile folders in there. From what I gathered all pupils who are logging into these computers are just pulling this profile down on their machines, is that correct? Our pupils have their own home folders and are told not to save anything anywhere else (profiles), because roaming profiles are poop.

 

This sounds like it could save a lot of storage on our servers. Is something like this worth deploying throughout the rest of the school? Would I run into a lot of problems? We have around 2 classrooms of 12 PCs, still running XP. We also have around 60% of our Whiteboard machines still running XP. Would this cause any issues? Obviously, I would run a separate policy for staff/department folders.

 

Any advice is much appreciated

[andydis]

sounds like you need a super mandatory profile for students

 

- beware some apps use the APPDATA path

[rrrrr]

This is a mandatory profile. It is a read only profile which has been preconfigured. All users profiles then point at this location. Anything not saved to their home drives is lost unless folder redirection is done for that location

[3s-gtech]

Mandatory profiles are good, they're often set in each user's profile path attribute - be aware that Windows 8, 8.1 and 10 are better off without them though it seems. As we're mostly 7 I've stuck, but I will need to re-evaluate that soon. Redirected appdata can handle most things now, but some software doesn't like it.