Roaming vs Mandatory profiles for students

[BatchFile]

Before I begin, I haven't tried mandatory profiles since NT4 days when it ended badly, so maybe you guys who know about or use them can help bring me up to date a little

 

I'm getting a little fed up of student roaming profiles (staff ones we can live with) breaking or getting excessively large and am once again willing to consider a mandatory profile for them all. Students already have:

* a mapped drive to save their work to

* "my documents" redirected by GPO to a folder they can't access to prevent them even thinking about saving there

* a managed desktop (GPO again) mapped to a read only share.

 

What else, apart from internet shortcuts, wouldn't work (or would only work with much fiddling) if we went to a mandatory profile for them all?

 

Cheers in advance

[sted]

why not redirect my docs to their mapped drive? i use folder redirection to redirect docs\pics\whatever else to u:\ or if the school is all win7 u:\docs etc that way using my docs isnt an issue

 

ive found mandatory profiles great for xp and just never seem to work quite right on win7 (and to do it the official way you need to sysprep a pc (nanas to that))

[sonofsanta]

When you say "internet shortcuts", do you just mean favourites? As I believe that can be redirected to a folder in their hmdir now anyway.

 

Also interested in this thread as mulling this over myself, be interesting to know if there's a way of maintaining Office settings etc. without having to redirect all of AppData (which is often what bloats)

[3s-gtech]

I'm a big advocate for mandatory profiles. We have them for students only, on a mixed 7/XP environment. Appdata is redirected. With this setup, logons are fast (back to back testing with roaming vs mandatory here was something like 1:2 in time) plus the students can't mess around with many features. Favourite one was stopping them from renaming the icons on thir desktop - if I used a redirected desktop I kept getting unwanted icons being created.

 

I did not follow the MS way of creating the profiles. This hasn't always worked for some people, but has been fine here for me. There are a number of ways of doing it without sysprep - my method involves a student user with no User GPs applied being logged on, their NTUSER.dat being grabbed from the local PC, regedit it and give Full Control to Everyone on the hive, then tweak and rename it as ntuser.man. Share this centrally, job done. Had to do two as XP and 7 need separate ones.