[21h2] How do you do your profiles? (updated)

[Disease]

Hi all,

 

We currently use Mandatory Profiles and redirected AppData and I am looking to see if there is a better way so I was wondering how other have set their profiles, what is the most efficient way?

 

UPDATE: We are a secondary school.

Edited November 8, 2022 by Disease

[danielghares]

Fslogix all the way for shared PC's - wouldn't touch anything else now. Staff laptops are all local profiles though.

[Patrick]

Local profiles for all, but student profiles are cleared at log off. The only thing we roam is a chrome profile for bookmarks/history etc. Works well for us at primary level.

[Duke5A]

Also local profiles for all. Student computers have the GPO to remove profiles after 30 days of none use.

[3s-gtech]

We are local for both. We still had super mandatory for students until recently, when something went badly wrong and logons randomly spiked up to 30 minutes+ in some cases.

 

Changing to local fixed it. No idea what the actual cause was, but it was time to change after all these years.

[Sadiq_to222]

For company wise we use local with folder redirection in place. Works incredibly well for us and enforce the remove profile every 30 days.

[Mr.Ben]

Pre going cloud I've been using local profiles with folder redirection since W7 SP1.

 

Profiles were deleted after 14 days.

 

With cloud its local for everything. On shared devices we delete profiles after 60 days and have specific seating plans for students (who should be uploading info to OneDrive).

[KK20]

local with redirected folders including appdata.

[MicrodigitUK]

+1 for FSLogix the only way to go if you have shared workstations and need to use OneDrive sync client. It’s the magic that roams the sync client cache between PCs with a FSLogix Office365 profile container on VHDX mounted from central file server. Would never go back to local profiles as the risk of users losing work with the OneDrive sync client is too high. E.G. Student saves work at end of lesson to OneDrive, it starts to sync file but they log off before it finished. Week later they log on to a different PC in the same classroom to carry on their work. Oh no the file never synced to online and they’ve lost their work from last week! Only way to get it back is to get the same user to log back onto the same PC previously used the week prior (if they remember) and hope that the local profile hasn’t been wiped! OneDrive client and local profiles are not a good idea in a shared workstation environment without FSLogix to fix this major issue. Edited November 17, 2022 by MicrodigitUK

[Boredguy]

All our 5 secondary schools use normal local profiles, with redirected documents folders to the OneDrive path (not known folder redirection) so nothing breaks before the sync happens, and profiles are deleted on logoff or up to 60 days depending on workstation.

 

Users are directed to save to the built-in "OneDrive" option in Office apps which negates the client sync issue as it's saved directly to the web, so only applications that really have a potential for not syncing if a student logs off straight away is Adobe and Serif suites.

 

We don't have any file servers storing any user profile/data so unlike the FSLogix option there is no VHDX, but in the last 2 years there have only been a handful of instances where files users have worked on have not been accessible.

It depends if you want to keep a central vhdx container for each user, or decease your centralised storage as was our choice since we've moved as much to OneDrive/SharePoint as possible for ease of access

[Oaktech]

Preference is local all the way - students deleted after 30 days, staff after 90.

 

One of my sites is progressively being migrated away from roaming profiles because they're just an absolute clusterf*ck of corruption and weirdness.

[Mr.Ben]

+1 for FSLogix the only way to go if you have shared workstations and need to use OneDrive sync client. It’s the magic that roams the sync client cache between PCs with a FSLogix Office365 profile container on VHDX mounted from central file server. Would never go back to local profiles as the risk of users losing work with the OneDrive sync client is too high. E.G. Student saves work at end of lesson to OneDrive, it starts to sync file but they log off before it finished. Week later they log on to a different PC in the same classroom to carry on their work. Oh no the file never synced to online and they’ve lost their work from last week! Only way to get it back is to get the same user to log back onto the same PC previously used the week prior (if they remember) and hope that the local profile hasn’t been wiped! OneDrive client and local profiles are not a good idea in a shared workstation environment without FSLogix to fix this major issue.

This is a really elegant solution!

[Zoom7000]

For everyone using local profiles, how long does the initial login take? Our first time login is over 2 minutes on some PCs, which is rather long and very annoying. Any tips on how to reduce this?

 

I've tried loads of different methods, even trying LTSC or removing all Windows apps from a Windows image using NTLite and even having a super stripped down version of Windows. But nothing seems to help!

[Delgado]

On curriculum PC's - one generic local profile for students, one for staff. All Internet history. login credentials and favourites deleted at logoff. UNC drives (including home drive) to Linux samba shares in Explorer. So that's like two.

[Olliedawg]

I'm finally moving our staff profiles away from roaming this next half term. Going for local profiles with folder redirection to their H:\ drive + Onedrive. Some of our staff have profiles as large as 8GB... dont ask.