Profile Advice - which route to take?

[cgiuk]

Thought i'd ask another question to do with the seemingly never ending profile debate. I'd just like to get people's thoughts on what they think would be best for me to do?

 

We are a small primary school with a small network (fewer than 50 individual users). We have a Server 2008 domain controller and XP Pro clients but after buying a few more machines, we are about to have Windows 7 Pro too.

 

We have been running our vanilla network with no major troubles, the kids have mandatory profiles and the staff have roaming ones. Both use folder redirection for things like documents and start menus etc. With Windows 7 about to happen though, we're not quite sure which route to take with profiles? Should we keep a mixture of roaming and mandatory profiles (one for XP, one for 7 etc)? Should we scrap roaming profiles and just use the locally generated ones being as we are already using folder redirection? Is there any major downside to giving the staff mandatory profiles? (it's only ever the roaming ones we have trouble with).

 

Is there anyone out there with a similar sized network and if so, how do you do it?

 

Cheers everyone

 

A few people on here have been really helpful already but I just thought i'd ask about.

[Guest blacksheep]

I dont think they are compatible, they never used to be in older version of windows. So what I did then was to minimalise, mandatory, defaults and the like.

Used to get errors on logon, office issues etc...

[Mr.Ben]

I am in the same position as you, at the cusp of deciding.

 

I'm in a special school though so I need to be able to change users settings and for those users to be able to roam with those settings.

 

So here's my thinking -

 

Individual roaming profiles for all student users, but then every folder redirected to the network (I assume that should stop them from being cached on the machine). That allows for me to make alterations to there profiles and for those profiles to roam without

 

Some folders will be redirected to read only shares (e.g the desktop) so that I can keep control of desktop icons etc.

 

For staff it is a little more complicated, and thats down to laptops which can be at home or away. There are only around 30 Laptops

 

I'm going to allow roaming user profiles and redirect all folders on 'Internal' Machines and allow the profiles to be cached on the laptops. I will do this by using group policy 'loopback' so that redirection occurs on the internal machines only.

 

Previously i've had a mandatory profile for all student users and then redirected everything to different folders. This doesn't allow for me to change cursors or visability options etc on a per user basis, which here is required.

Edited December 1, 2010 by Mr.Ben