RM CC4 Laptop deployment

[MNHughes]

Hi Everyone,

 

We have laptops that at the moment are on vanilla XP, now that we are migrating to CC4 we would like to get our laptops also working on CC4 however....

 

The laptops need to be used on trips occasionally which means they will need to be disconnected at some point.

 

So for some further information I have looked through the RM documentation to see how RM achieve this, unfortunately there is little to no documentation for laptop builds and after a few phone calls I found out that RM use something called RM Synchronise which seems suspiciously similar to Microsoft Offline files.

 

Anyway, the process that the students would need to go through is as follows:

 

Onsite

1. Log onto the laptop so that their profile is cached.

 

2. Open their N drive and locate the files they plan on using.

 

3. Select, right-click the files and make them available offline.

 

4. Log off and shutdown, make note of the laptop

 

Offsite

1. Use the same laptop as before and logon

 

2. Open your files that you have made available offline

 

3. Edit the files, log off, shutdown.

 

Now when the students get back onsite they will need to connected to the network and logon, aparently there are known performance issues with this and students have the option to make thier whole N drive available offline.

 

Our laptops connect to our network via a wireless connection now imagine all 20 or so students doing this some of which are synchonising their whole n drive.

 

In conclusion we're now looking into redirecting the My Doc's folder locally and leaving the N drive mapped then all they have to do is copy thier files across. (we thought of USB sticks but there easily lost).

 

Does anybody know how to achieve a My Docs redirect on CC4?

[mbrunt]

I don't understand much about RM, or infact why on earth anybody actually uses it, but anyway...

 

I'd just build your laptops however you usually build them, and get the students to logon in school before they leave so that there is a locally cached profile on the actual laptop. Then when students are offside get them to logon and save to a usb stick??

[MNHughes]

I don't understand much about RM, or infact why on earth anybody actually uses it, but anyway...

 

I'd just build your laptops however you usually build them, and get the students to logon in school before they leave so that there is a locally cached profile on the actual laptop. Then when students are offside get them to logon and save to a usb stick??

 

We usually build our laptops by deploying an image via Acronis Snap Deploy.

 

Currently students logon to the vanilla laptops with the same account that they use in CC3 however...

 

...because CC3 is managed by GPO's and some software components for one reason or another the students account at one point becomes corrupted.

 

Acronis have consistantly given us bad support for a number of years so we would like to move away from them, we are also looking into Norton Ghost as a deployment method but we'd rather have both the laptops and workstations all managed under the same technology as it's easier/quicker/consistant to manage.

 

As for using USB/SD cards we may have to use this as a solution but it's much easier to lose a USB drive/SD card than it is to lose a laptop.