Roaming profiles 1

[tuliphead]

A lot of questions in the same thread:

1) Anyone managed to deploy roaming profiles in mixed environments that contains both windows 2000 and windows xp clients? Is it possible to roam between those two operating systems with the same profile?
2) Anyone managed to deploy roaming profiles in mixed office environments that contains both office xp and office 2003
3) Anyone managed to deploy roaming profiles in environments that satisfy both the first and second questions? (2k/xp & xp/2003 office)

Further on:
4) I am looking for the best way to script the creation of outlook profiles. Again I have this mix of two different office versions. Ideally I would like to autocreate the mail-profile for users each time they logged on the system (to autofix possible corrupt profiles for instance), but I am unsure if it is possible to keep such things as signatures and adress-lists etc, when users get a new profile each time they log on)
5) Bandwith is a criteria here. Roaming users will log on to the domain via a dsl interface, I have a 2Mbit connection so I need to be selective when it comes to what to include in users profile, to trim the size of the profile as much down as possible. What is the best way to do this? (Any working examples? Policies/scripts? etc?). I know how to redirect the my documents folder for instance. But what about other folders or parts of the profile?

The one that could give a good answer to these questions, fully deserves at least 5 stars

 

[snootalope]

hey man..

I've tried the 2k/xp & xp/2003 office setup myself. I really didn't see alot of problems going from xp to 2k, but I ran into troubles when coming from office 2k3 machine back to the office xp. The outlook would randomly and pretty frequently generate a "A significant change in one or more of your Outlook files needs to be repaired......." something like that. Then, i'd have to put the office Xp cd in so it could fix it. Outlook by far is our most important program so as soon as I saw how big of a problem this message was going to be, I said the hell with it and deceided to hold off on office 2k3 for a while.. maybe you can find a way around it though. I can't even tell you which files changed, but I know office Xp wasn't havin it..

About the profiles. best thing to do, is stop the basic folders from copying. Temp, temp internet files, History, etc. this can all be done in a group policy being applied to the users. It's under User configuration, Administrative templates, System, profiles. Just open the "Exclude directories from roamin profile" and enter just the name of the directory you don't want to copy. like this: History;Temporary Internet Files;Temp;etc..

That's the second best way to cut down on profile size, the best way is to keep reminding people to use their home drive for storage, not the damn desktop!!!

good look man..

snoots
I

 

[tuliphead]

Hi snootalope!

Thanx a lot for the info. It was helpful. Do you by the way know the best way to autocreate outlook profiles when users log on their computers? Is it any difference between office2k/xp/2003 in which tools are in use? Are there any resources (working examples) on the net that describes the prosess?

 

[Deeem]

Hi,

I am also having a few problems with roaming profiles.

I have setup the profile path of the user in the AD user properties. In system/advanced/user profiles I cannot click copy to.. on the user and roaming profiles is greyed out. :/

Has anyone had this problem before?

I know the user has ownership of the profile folder and that I can write and create folders in there.

A solution to this would save alot of aggro for me.

Cheers guys

DeeeM

 

[snootalope]

the only process that I know of, or used, to create outlook profiles, is the user them selves logging in and running outlook for the first time. They can totally customize it from there, but as far as I know, there isn't a way to create a default outlook profile other than the one created upon first use...

hope that helps

DeeeM: I'm a little confused, where is "system/advanced/user profiles" located at? In AD U & A, you should just be able to copy an user to create a duplicate, and copy the actual user profile them selves for duplicate profiles...

 

[Deeem]

Sorry, I described it wrong.

After setting the user profile in AD on the server.

On my client machine i want to change my user account type to be a roaming profile. To do this I went to ->
control panel/system/advanced/user profile settings.

The problem is, the "copy to" option is greyed out!

Thanks

Damon

 

[JVANH]

About creating Outlook Profiles,

Microsoft has a set of tools called the "Microsoft Office 2003 Resource Kit" (The ORK)

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/FX011511471033.aspx

It has a program called "Custom Installation Wizard". You can run through this to create a custom installer that will have all of you setting for Outlook in it. Or you can just use it to create a script called a .PRF file. This is an executable script that will run in Outlook 2002 (XP) or 2003 (I have not gotten it to work in 2000). It can create a new Outlook profile or modify an existing profile depending on how you have it setup. We just moved from a SendMail email system to an Exchange Server this year. I used it to create a script that I distributed to all of my users (about 460) with instructions on how to double click it (Yea we had to give them instructions on how to double click). You can use it to set just about any setting in Outlook. We even were able to create a script for our users that use laptops and Roam off campus. We are using RPC over HTTPS rather than a VPN connection for them to check their mail. IF you create a new profile with it It can set it as the default profile and will leave the old one in place. So if you have any problems with the new one you can switch back to the old profile. This has been a great tool for us.

Van