[1709, fcu] Student Profiles and Guest Group Membership

[smarties11]

Hi All,

 

Currently testing the use of local profiles as part of our upcoming Windows 10 deployment. Seems to be working well so far. Have started looking at U-EV for staff instead of redirecting appdata.

 

However, for pupils my concern is hundreds of local profiles stored on machines. I appreciate I can use the 'deleting profiles older than...' GPO however I understand that this isn't reliable, and using delprof2 is an additional step.

 

I started searching online around 'forcing temporary profiles' for students and came across an article stating that members of the local computer group 'guests' will always be given a temporary profile. I've added our student group to the guest group on a local machine and tested, and indeed the profile is removed at logoff. I can set this to apply to all machines using a GPO.

 

Our students are already used to their profiles not persisting, so there is no issue there - but - can anyone foresee any issues with this approach? The description of the guest group in Win10 says that basically a member of this group has the same permissions to the local machine as a standard user, but I wasn't sure if making student users a member of this group added further restrictions?

 

Would appreciate any thoughts before I do a full scale test!

 

Thanks!

[itwasntme]

We were adding students to the 'Guests' group, initially through 'domain guests' then instead through local assignment of our domain all students group to local Guests group but unfortunately had to change this approach after realising it was causing us issues.

 

Although we managed to work through a number of the issues, the one that really stuck and caused us to revert was the use of Adobe CS6 Photoshop - https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2127910 .

 

If you don't care about/use/own Adobe CS I think use of the 'Guest' mechanic works very well for students with local profiles.

[smarties11]

We were adding students to the 'Guests' group, initially through 'domain guests' then instead through local assignment of our domain all students group to local Guests group but unfortunately had to change this approach after realising it was causing us issues.

 

Although we managed to work through a number of the issues, the one that really stuck and caused us to revert was the use of Adobe CS6 Photoshop - https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2127910 .

 

If you don't care about/use/own Adobe CS I think use of the 'Guest' mechanic works very well for students with local profiles.

 

This is really useful, thank you. We do use CS but an older version (4) - which isn't actually officially Windows 10 compatible but it does apparently work. Will be interesting to see if it has the same guest issue. Unfortunately the cost of annual licensing for Adobe precludes us from upgrading to a newer version.

 

Out of interest - what were the other issues you saw that you were able to overcome?

 

Thanks :-)

[itwasntme]

This is really useful, thank you. We do use CS but an older version (4) - which isn't actually officially Windows 10 compatible but it does apparently work. Will be interesting to see if it has the same guest issue. Unfortunately the cost of annual licensing for Adobe precludes us from upgrading to a newer version.

 

Out of interest - what were the other issues you saw that you were able to overcome?

 

Thanks :-)

 

We managed to squeeze in an upgrade to CS6 knowing there was going to be a very expensive shift over to the Creative Cloud platform.

Relatively simple to test the issue with Guest users even on CS4, just add one of your domain accounts to the local Guests group, login as that user and try to open PhotoShop.

From memory, the other issues may not have been related to Guest, as we were working on a lot of different things at the same time, but if they were, possibly Windows 10 built-in apps?

[smarties11]

We managed to squeeze in an upgrade to CS6 knowing there was going to be a very expensive shift over to the Creative Cloud platform.

Relatively simple to test the issue with Guest users even on CS4, just add one of your domain accounts to the local Guests group, login as that user and try to open PhotoShop.

From memory, the other issues may not have been related to Guest, as we were working on a lot of different things at the same time, but if they were, possibly Windows 10 built-in apps?

 

Yeah, I'm installing CS4 on a test machine as we speak so we shall see. Yeah, I can't believe how expensive the creative cloud is for schools. We only paid £5k for a 500 user perpetual site licence for CS4 many years ago. We were quoted something crazy like £10kpa for creative cloud!

 

Which way did you go with student profiles in the end since you ditched the guest route? Are you just using local profiles and then clearing them down regularly?

 

Thanks

[itwasntme]

Yea local profiles, using GPO to configure a scheduled task to delprof2 inactive profiles when idle, on logoff etc