aboell

Your summary is spot on; it has hit a sweet spot with functionality/features vs cost. I am playing around with it to see exactly what type of offline functionality it may have. From what I've seen so far, the breaking point seems to be on the login; without an Internet connection you cannot log in. But once logged in, you still have minimal functionality. My hope is that in the event that users are already logged in and we lose Internet connectivity (but maintain wireless connectivity to local resources) that students could still access local, in-house servers. Since we host our own Moodle and SIS servers, we won't be completely down in the classroom. Google also is supposed to be working on offline versions of Docs, so once they figure that out it will add an additional layer of offline functionality, but that's most likely only going to work if the users are already logged on. I highly doubt Google will release a local accounts caching server; they just assume that everyone has rock solid Internet connections. I am also trying to experiment with installing another OS on it just in case Google drops the project. So far I personally haven't had any luck but I have read that others have. If I can get it to work, then I won't be stuck with a bunch of paper weights if they pull the Chromebook project and quit maintaining the OS and updates.

Our school is starting to take the Chromebook plunge. The key for us was the day-long battery life and 10 second boot time. While true, as mentioned in many prior comments, that these are a thin-client that will not be able to meet the need of businesses, they do meet the need for 90% of what our students do at school. For the remaining 10%, we will still maintain fat-client labs, but are looking into HTML5 RDP solutions to move all that processing to the server. We just ordered our first cart today and if our trial goes well, will be ordering another 6 carts for next year, then hopefully another 6-9 the following year.

One other thing to keep in mind is depending on your anti-virus installed, it may update the date modified on the user profile and prevent your automated profile deletion methods from being removed. There is a Microsoft Hotfix to correct it (KB983544). The GPO removed only on boot up, but you can use scripts to execute delprof2 to do it upon user logoff/logon. Personally, I use just the GPO as delprof2 requires to be ran as administrator, so when a student logs in they don't have the permissions. I have attempted to include credentials in the script but I couldn't get it to work very well. After I got the GPO to work, I quit trying to get delprof2 to work upon logon.