Outlook 2007 mandatory profiles

[ful56_uk]

Hi

 

staff have mandatory profiles and use outlook 2007. However when they setup there settings within outlook like fonts, stationary etc.... After a log off all settings are lost. How can I put this right?

 

Thanks

 

mark

[deKay]

Er, don't use mandatory profiles?

 

Surely one of the points of mandatory profiles is to prevent you from permanently changing settings?

[ajbritton]

If you really do want to use mandatory profiles to enforce a 'baseline' profile but allow users to tweak certain settings, then this can be achieved using 'Flex Profiles' (Immidio | Flex Profiles). The Express Edition is free. I've looked at them from time to time but never had a good occasion to use them. Edited September 11, 2009 by ajbritton
added note about Express edition

[ful56_uk]

Yeah what I was expecting really. Is there any way of hacking the ntuser.man and changing the location in there?

[Michael]

If you redirect the Outlook.PST to say H:\My Documents\Outlook\ this should work, as of course users can write to their home directories.

[User3204]

The user.dat and user.man are the user hive from the registry.

 

So you can edit it by opening it from regedit (or possibly regedt32) although there is something on the MS site that specifically states you must close the file not just quit regedit.

 

If you know where the outlook data files are stored / redirected in the registry then, yes.

[zag]

I would love to know this as well.

 

I don't want to give teachers any kind of customisation other than outlook 2007.

 

Not found a way yet so they are still stuck on slow roaming profiles that often get corrupted.

Edited September 14, 2009 by zag

[ajbritton]

Relocating the PST will not enable users to save configuration changes to Outlook. These settings are mostly saved in the user portion of registry or under Application Data.

 

The default location for PST files is under the Local Settings\Application Data folder which cannot (and should not) be redirected. It is certainly possible to store PST files on a network drive/share although this is not supported according to Microsoft (Personal folder files are unsupported over a LAN or over a WAN link).

 

There is some information here (How to manage .pst files in Outlook 2007, in Outlook 2003, and in Outlook 2002) about transferring settings between PCs that may be of use.

 

The Flex Profile kit is designed specifically to address this problem so that mandatory profiles can be deployed but end users can still be given a limited and controlled level of customisation ability.