Roaming profiles

[hywaydave]

Can people list some obvious reasons why not to use Roaming profiles? My boss is thinking about implementing Roaming profiles but I think it's a bad idea because of network congestion in the morning when people log on for the first time and also the possibility of the profile becoming corrupted during the copy to workstation process and the copy back to server process when they log out. Can someone point me to some articles explaining the disadvantages? I'm having a difficult time finding them.

Thanks.

 

[captaincrunch00]

I dont have any articles but you nailed the biggest one on the head.
They can get pretty huge and take a lot longer for the PC to get to the desktop once you type in your password. If you get someone who always puts a 5MB picture as their background then they'll see a performance hit.

I hope you've got a way to copy all of the local profiles to the server, then use those as the roaming profiles because I'm sure everyone has their desktop set the way they like it, and if they all get reset it'll be a pain in the butt to run around to all the PCs and fix shortcuts and the feel of the desktop.

Another thing: Shortcuts. When you move computers and you still have shortcuts to something that this computer doesnt have. Maybe a program, maybe an excel document that is on a shared drive that this computer cant map... Things like that.

Good luck, I got here and immediately turned off roaming profiles and it made everyone much happier.

 

[Helenp1983]

The possiblity of a secuirty issue, where i used to work the Administrators were not allowed roaming profiles becuase customers had access to the PC's and should they be standing next to an administrator logged on they may see things not to be seen. If your users are not good at locking there computers it is more of a secuirty issue as managers may login other than in there office.

But mostly they are just slow with loggin on and consume a hunge amount of your backup. And as above users will be confused when certain software doesn't work.

At my college we had J++ installer on my loggin, so every machine i sat at then had access to J++ after i logged off, basically the whole building after a year. Bad idea.