[ms office - 2007] Correct setup for word templates

[bondbill2k2]

I'd be grateful if someone could explain the proper configuration and methods for setting up word templates for a domain environment as I believe ours is incorrect or follows bad practice and has been in place before I started here my first job in IT so its the only method I've been familiar with.

 

All our students share the same mandatory profile and the current setup is set using group policy shared paths

 

Both the user templates and workgroup templates are set to USERPROFILE\appdata\microsoft\template this path contains only the normal.dotm set to read only, from what I read this file should be be shared and each user should have their own normal.dotm but how would this be configured on mandatory profiles? Would the shared path just be set to the mapped homedrive OR \\server\share$\%username% and let word create the templates itself then use a shared folder for the workgroup with read only?

 

I want to set the default font and font size plus a few other configurations including auto-text for the author name in a footer for all new documents created, I have a template with this setup but need to know the best practice to use