Move from Roaming profiles to less hungry profile management

[ranj]

Hi

 

I wanted to ask fellow members about how I could change all of our staff members from roaming profiles to a mandatory profile which can also be a bit roaming too, if that makes sense!

 

All of our staff members have roaming profiles and pupils have mandatory profiles and what I want to do is to move all staff profiles so every staff member gets a central profile from the server but they can also customise that profile. Is this possible?

 

Or could I do it if a particular member of staff cannot get used to a mandatory profile, I can give that particular user or a selected few users a roaming profile? has anyone done something similar to this?

 

The only problem I see is some of our users need to use the full blown version of Outlook rather than OWA and I know this ties in with a roaming profile, if I was to revert these users to a mandatory profile, I am worried that we can set them up the onetime to connect to our exchange server, but then as soon as they log off, those settings will disappear and we would need to reconfigure those again. Is there a workaround to this if we wanted to use mandatory profiles for these users.

 

Can someone who uses Exchange 2007 than this problem is eliminated now, I have heard that with 2007 Outlook integration is far better because rather than tieing that user to a profile, it looks in AD, see's if that user has an email account, the user can click on Outlook and hey presto they have they emails in outlook without any configuring, could someone confirm this?

 

I also want this mandatory profile to keep favourites and desktop in the home directory rather than profile, am I right in thinking this is done through GPO under folder redirection?

 

In my whole time working in IT I have never needed to make these sort of changes and Its the first time I going to undertake this. If someone could provide some assistance it would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks

[tmcd35]

You could set up a 'Default User' profile in your domains NETLOGON share (\\

 

This will probably give you what you are looking for.

[djm968]

GPO Folder Redirection is an option you may like to consider. Using folder redirection, you can redirect application data, desktops and start menus and implement a semi-roaming profile with the redirected folders residing in a central location.

[ranj]

Thanks for the replies.

 

One of the reasons why I have been looking at this is that a particular member of staff is having some serious issues with his roaming profile.

 

This is how it works over here:

 

Each member of staff who has a roaming profile has an entry in AD users and computers under the profile path in profile which says \\servername\teacherprofile$\nameofuser

 

On the server where all the roaming profiles are stored there is a folder for each user and in their are the profile objects. Each user has full control to their profile folder.

 

One particular user is having a right nightmare, basically his profile was so big that we had to delete it and recreate a new one. So what I did was create a new folder in the profile area with a new name and then told AD to point to that new name.

 

So initially it began working and profile was small and everything was well, but for some reason now all of the original objects have now reappeared again!! I dont know how this could happen because i used a different profile name so even if the teacher logged onto a machine which had his old big profile on there I was expecting that it wouldn't reference to it because it was a different name.

 

I have tried everything I can think of and am not getting anywhere with this. Any advice on this would be most appreciated.

 

Thanks

[tmcd35]

I'd start by setting a limit to the profile size and then question the teacher concerned to see if they are saving work to their desktop.

[ranj]

The thing is though, its not the teachers fault. He is defo not putting the stuff back in, it seems to be picking the items from a machine he may have logged onto previously and then merging the changes.

[tmcd35]

You could always just create him a fresh user account. Same username but with a number at the end.

[ranj]

Thanks, do you think its referencing the old profile back with a username.

[matt40k]

Be easier to create him a new user account.

[jamesb]

My guess is that you're right and its merging his profile back when he logs onto an old machine. Username's irrelevant to this if he's using the same account, as it'll be using the object GUID.

[maniac]

The thing is though, its not the teachers fault. He is defo not putting the stuff back in, it seems to be picking the items from a machine he may have logged onto previously and then merging the changes.

 

That's almost precisely what is happening.

 

What you need to do is turn the option on in Active directory that deletes cached profiles at logoff, that way you won't get profiles littering the machines. You can also script the DELPROF program to run at machine startup if needs be this will remove all user profiles off the machine. Of course be careful not to do this on their own laptops, or staff won't be able to use them oustside the building.

 

The best thing you can do to reduce profile size is to redirect the teachers desktop, and possibly also their Application Data folder. Teachers love saving anything and everything to their desktop, so by redirecting this to their homefolder, you stop all this clogging up the user profile. We direct it to a folder called Desktop inside their home area.

 

Application data isn't so bad, unless there's a lot of programs installed on the machines. Be warned, re-directing application data can have repercussions if you're using off-line files, as it won't syncronise properly if any of the files are in use, which they quite often will be in this folder. In my opinion best left where it is.

 

Mike.

[matt40k]

Rather then redirecting parts of the [apps data] profile, it might be easier to exclude them. Adobe is a good one to exclude.

 

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315415

Edited July 13, 2009 by matt40k
MS KB added

[gshaw]

Appdata is the one that kills roaming profiles (provided you've redirected the desktop and MyDocs which should be done anyway)... recently I've realised why our staff roaming profiles always corrupt and take ages to load because Appdata was redirected into the profile folder

 

So that's 75MB+ of data going back and forwards every logon... nightmare and soon to be changed once I finished with the teaching machines