Redirected folders and mandatory profile

[localzuk]

I am having a think about how some of our schools are set up and I had a thought.

 

One of the schools redirects everything and has everything locked down via GPO, but also has a mandatory profile.

 

Is the mandatory profile strictly necessary any more? I'm trying to think of things that it still does, but coming up short.

[sted]

it can make logon times shorter esp at 1st logon over local/roaming profiles but ive generally moved away from them

[localzuk]

With all the client machines being moved to SSDs, logon times aren't a huge issue any more really. So I may just move away from them and stick to GPO and redirected stuff instead. One less thing to worry about.

[Garacesh]

There are some things that can't be set my GPO that a mandatory profile can cover.. W8/10 colours and what items are pinned to the taskbar and Windows 10's WinX menu spring immediately to mind but I'm certain there are more things.

We use mandatory profiles here because the vast majority of our machines aren't using SSD's and it does make a sizeable difference to login times.

[ReBoot]

I still prefer mandatory profiles. Unless you are using roaming profiles the alternative will load a copy of the default profile from the local machine and then redirect key folders to your server. I've found that this does lead to some differences in the user experience as there tend to be minor differences in the default profiles.

 

Also mandatory profiles do get deleted when the user logs off something that doesn't always happen that reliably using local profiles.

 

Seems to work better if everyone loads exactly the same mandatory profile and then performs any redirection based on this.