[1803, au] Best Practice for creating Win 10 student mandatory profile

[Silica]

I'm in the process of creating our students new mandatory profile to use with Windows 10 next term.

 

What best practices should be considered when customising the profile for students overall experience in mind?

[synaesthesia]

For next term I'd strongly suggest moving away from them in favour of local profiles & redirection and/or using UE-V; less time to log on, less resource used and mandatory is being phased out along with roaming profiles so will keep you rather more futureproof.

[Arthur]

What best practices should be considered when customising the profile for students overall experience in mind?

Don't bother creating one.

 

Like @synaesthesia, I also recommend going with local profiles.

[Silica]

For next term I'd strongly suggest moving away from them in favour of local profiles & redirection and/or using UE-V; less time to log on, less resource used and mandatory is being phased out along with roaming profiles so will keep you rather more futureproof.

 

Don't bother creating one.

 

Like @synaesthesia, I also recommend going with local profiles.

 

 

Fair enough.

Wont local profiles fill up the local disk eventually?

Everything is already redirected, excluding AppData so some data will be stored locally.

Also wont logins take a few minutes as it has to create the new profile for the student every login?

[DrBeaker]

We still use roaming profiles (an RM school) so I wonder how this is going to affect us over the next few years?

 

I'm already getting messages about profiles not synchronised when users are logging off on Windows 10 at the moment.

[Silica]

We introduced Local Profiles with everything except AppData to all staff when we migrated to Windows 10, but staff generally only use a single device so it's been fantastic (coming from 2GB roaming profiles with shared teacher classroom PCs).

 

I'm not sure how well local profiles for students would work though...

[DrBeaker]

We introduced Local Profiles with everything except AppData to all staff when we migrated to Windows 10, but staff generally only use a single device so it's been fantastic (coming from 2GB roaming profiles with shared teacher classroom PCs).

 

I'm not sure how well local profiles for students would work though...

 

We've gone from 10-year old machines with 4GB RAM/HDD with no maintenance done on them since they were installed and a logon time of 10-20x mins. To i5, 8GB RAM, 256GB M2 SSD machines with a logon time of under 1x minute., This is with roaming profiles. Even with the typical IT crap in mine (probably the largest in the school) they still load fast.

[psumner1992]

Local profiles and redirected appdata for staff and students for us has been much better than roaming profiles ever were, very rarely need to reset profiles anymore.

 

First login times including OneDrive provisioning with silent SSO around 30-40 seconds, down to 15-20 seconds on future logins.

 

Based on:

win 10 1809

i5 (2nd gen & 3rd gen)

6GB - 8GB RAM

120GB - 240GB SSD

[DrBeaker]

Local profiles and redirected appdata for staff and students for us has been much better than roaming profiles ever were, very rarely need to reset profiles anymore.

 

First login times including OneDrive provisioning with silent SSO around 30-40 seconds, down to 15-20 seconds on future logins.

 

Based on:

win 10 1809

i5 (2nd gen & 3rd gen)

6GB - 8GB RAM

120GB - 240GB SSD

 

Interesting - How are you doing the silent sign-on? Just for Onedrive?

[fiza]

Local profiles and redirected appdata for staff and students for us has been much better than roaming profiles ever were, very rarely need to reset profiles anymore.

 

First login times including OneDrive provisioning with silent SSO around 30-40 seconds, down to 15-20 seconds on future logins.

 

Based on:

win 10 1809

i5 (2nd gen & 3rd gen)

6GB - 8GB RAM

120GB - 240GB SSD

What's the benefit of redirecting appdata please? I'm sure someone on here said it wasn't worth redirecting appdata anymore. We are just in the process of moving to windows 10 so very interested.

[DrBeaker]

What's the benefit of redirecting appdata please? I'm sure someone on here said it wasn't worth redirecting appdata anymore. We are just in the process of moving to windows 10 so very interested.

 

I remember reading something similar, was this it?

 

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4294935/folder-redirection-not-available-for-appdata-roaming-folder-win-10

[psumner1992]

Interesting - How are you doing the silent sign-on? Just for Onedrive?

 

We have the OneDrive group policies configured for silently sign in users to the OneDrive sync client with their windows credentials.

 

We use Azure AD connect to sync on-prem accounts to Office365 with seamless SSO configured.

 

Machines are running the per machine version of OneDrive sync tool.

[psumner1992]

What's the benefit of redirecting appdata please? I'm sure someone on here said it wasn't worth redirecting appdata anymore. We are just in the process of moving to windows 10 so very interested.

 

We have it setup from Windows 7 days, can probably remove it, will be something for us to test over the summer to see what impact it has removing the redirection, but we have had no negative issues in having it redirected.

[synaesthesia]

No, you can delete profiles on logoff/shutdown (we do it on shutdown in case multiple uses per day), plus with the majority redirected there's very little information kept in profiles anyway. A quick check on one of our machines which never seems to delete profiles for unknown reasons, has around 30 left loitering on it and they total just under a gig in size. Delprof'd it now

[Silica]

No, you can delete profiles on logoff/shutdown (we do it on shutdown in case multiple uses per day), plus with the majority redirected there's very little information kept in profiles anyway. A quick check on one of our machines which never seems to delete profiles for unknown reasons, has around 30 left loitering on it and they total just under a gig in size. Delprof'd it now

 

Interesting.

Assuming you customise the default profile and build that in to your image?

 

Say you can't amend the default profile into the image.... How would one then customise the profile to suit the needs of the students?

[Chuckster]

I don't get how roaming profiles are an issue for anyone.

 

I've been using roaming profiles since the days of XP, with the appdata folder redirected. Currently the same method is also being used in Windows 10 as it was when we were on Windows 7.

 

Logging on times is anywhere between 20-30 seconds on an Intel i3-3220 3.30GHz, 4GB RAM, Samsung EVO 840 250GB SSD. These are RM workstations that are now 7 years old and the only thing upgraded was changing the HDD to SSD.

 

I was going to implement UE-V in place of roaming profiles early last year but read somewhere that UE-V is going to be deprecated.

 

For those using local profiles, how do you retain user settings, e.g. rearranged desktop icons, folder view, accessibility for the visually impaired (large icons, large cursor, inverted colours) etc?

More importantly, Outlook configurations for your office based staff?

[Silica]

I don't get how roaming profiles are an issue for anyone.

 

I've been using roaming profiles since the days of XP, with the appdata folder redirected. Currently the same method is also being used in Windows 10 as it was when we were on Windows 7.

 

Logging on times is anywhere between 20-30 seconds on an Intel i3-3220 3.30GHz, 4GB RAM, Samsung EVO 840 250GB SSD. These are RM workstations that are now 7 years old and the only thing upgraded was changing the HDD to SSD.

 

I was going to implement UE-V in place of roaming profiles early last year but read somewhere that UE-V is going to be deprecated.

 

For those using local profiles, how do you retain user settings, e.g. rearranged desktop icons, folder view, accessibility for the visually impaired (large icons, large cursor, inverted colours) etc?

More importantly, Outlook configurations for your office based staff?

 

For staff we've implemented local profiles with everything redirected excluding AppData.

 

Office staff generally only use one desktop

Teachers only use one laptop

 

Students on the other hand are all using Windows 7 still, which i am in the process of migrating to Windows 10 now which is why I need to create them a new Mandatory profile.

[synaesthesia]

I don't get how roaming profiles are an issue for anyone.

 

I've been using roaming profiles since the days of XP, with the appdata folder redirected. Currently the same method is also being used in Windows 10 as it was when we were on Windows 7.

 

Logging on times is anywhere between 20-30 seconds on an Intel i3-3220 3.30GHz, 4GB RAM, Samsung EVO 840 250GB SSD. These are RM workstations that are now 7 years old and the only thing upgraded was changing the HDD to SSD.

 

I was going to implement UE-V in place of roaming profiles early last year but read somewhere that UE-V is going to be deprecated.

 

For those using local profiles, how do you retain user settings, e.g. rearranged desktop icons, folder view, accessibility for the visually impaired (large icons, large cursor, inverted colours) etc?

More importantly, Outlook configurations for your office based staff?

 

All doable with UE-V's templates etc, yes it's being depreciated but pretty much only to be replaced directly. Outlook configs not an issue anyway with autodiscover/sso with office 365. Desktops read only here, dissuading anyone from using it and noone over the last few years has commented or been worried about thins not being customisable.

[DrBeaker]

I don't get how roaming profiles are an issue for anyone.

 

I've been using roaming profiles since the days of XP, with the appdata folder redirected. Currently the same method is also being used in Windows 10 as it was when we were on Windows 7.

 

Logging on times is anywhere between 20-30 seconds on an Intel i3-3220 3.30GHz, 4GB RAM, Samsung EVO 840 250GB SSD. These are RM workstations that are now 7 years old and the only thing upgraded was changing the HDD to SSD.

 

I was going to implement UE-V in place of roaming profiles early last year but read somewhere that UE-V is going to be deprecated.

 

For those using local profiles, how do you retain user settings, e.g. rearranged desktop icons, folder view, accessibility for the visually impaired (large icons, large cursor, inverted colours) etc?

More importantly, Outlook configurations for your office based staff?

 

For me a lot of it was old hardware, neglected hardare, no upgrades etc over the years prior to me. As well as a lot of RM crap running in the background and Trend being CPU-intensive. But especially

"...accessibility for the visually impaired (large icons, large cursor, inverted colours) etc?"

is a point of interest for me.

[Chuckster]

Without roaming profiles I can't see how anybody would retain settings that a visually impaired person would create. You can't expect them to set things up again with each logon, surely.

 

And just to clarify our desktops are redirected to user home drives for admin and SLT, while teachers, non-teachers and students are redirected to a share that is read-only.

 

Roaming profiles are between 2MB to 10MB. Mine is 7.90MB and a general ICT account that I use to log on everywhere else to perform fixes is 6.89MB.

[Silica]

Without roaming profiles I can't see how anybody would retain settings that a visually impaired person would create. You can't expect them to set things up again with each logon, surely.

 

And just to clarify our desktops are redirected to user home drives for admin and SLT, while teachers, non-teachers and students are redirected to a share that is read-only.

 

Roaming profiles are between 2MB to 10MB. Mine is 7.90MB and a general ICT account that I use to log on everywhere else to perform fixes is 6.89MB.

 

If we have a student that requires special settings, we could always just set them up with a roaming profile to retain the settings.

[DrBeaker]

If we have a student that requires special settings, we could always just set them up with a roaming profile to retain the settings.

 

That's what I was thinking. But then if you end up with a lot of students who need this, sometimes for SEN reasons etc. You end back up at square 1 with roaming profiles again!