Setting up Office 97 on Metaframe 1.8

[wilsona]

Does anyone have any detailed instructions of how to get Office (word 97 especially) working properly on Metaframe 1.8. We wish to use just a few mandatory profiles to cut down on maintenance, but we cannot seem to solve the word 97 templates problem. i.e word stores certain settings in the template file normal.dot. The important ones are the default user documents location and the locations of user and workgroup templates. Obviously, with a mandatory profile, any changes a user makes to their profile are not retained between sessions - but these settings are supposed to be held in the users local normal.dot (which is in their home directory). Anyway our users settings are not being retained - can anyone help?

 

[PronetSolutions]

Have you run the application compatability scripts? If not you must run these scripts. They are located under your WINNT or WTSRV folder. You should run the chkroot script, then run rootdrv script. This will set a default root drive W: by default which point to the users profile folder. Then change to the Install directory, and run both the office97 and the outlk98 scripts. These scripts will copy the office/outlook templates into each users profile. This will give each user exclusive use to his/her own templates.

 

[CitrixEngineer]

For file location adjustments you will need to either implement a policy which changes these paths, or locate the necessary All Users registry key.

It would be better to point File location paths to server locations rather than client drives, otherwise you will be asking the servers to transfer files - something that ICA was not designed for. That way you could hard-code a url like \\%homedrive%\myfiles.

It is possible to adjust global locations by running the application in change user /install mode and making the changes.

I hope this helps

 

[wilsona]

Thanks for the replies, but neither are applicable as far as I can see. I have installed the application exactly as Citrix say in the document MS_Office97.pdf which I obtained from the Citrix site. Application install compatibility scripts have been run. The Citrix document assumes non-mandatory profiles, for which the installation is easy. If every user has their own profile, then nothing needs to be done. It is when all users are using one profile which is the problem. The registry does not seem to be involved. I would expect this to be a common problem encountered by lots of sites for which there is a straightforward answer - Office 97 can be installed with one global mandatory profile, or it can't.

 

[masai]

Once you run the Application Compatibility Scripts, you will need roaming / local profiles. They complicate the situation.
I have used mandatory profiles before and we have migrated to roaming ones. Word assumes that every user will modify normal.dot every time they change a font to bold or edit a style. We had a big overhead in administration having to disconnect sessions for the users once word got "locked" with "unable to save normal.dot" messages and etc. And believe, me we have much less administration now.
We have built a basic profile for all users and we daily backup the existent ones. The home directories sit in Novell servers.
I know this just adds to your frustration but, mandatory profile applies to very few situations and full desktop publishing is not one of them.

 

[masai]

Sorry. I guess you wanted more objectivity:
As far as I know, Office does not work properly with mandatory profiles.

 

[CitrixEngineer]

Set the users up with a normal roaming profile, make all the changes, then change the roaming profiles to mandatory ones.

It will work, with a bit of patient tweaking

 

[masai]

Mandatory profiles imply that the user has no customization. No personal dictionary, user typer initials, no styles defined, no printer defined, no page size modifications and so on. And, when the user tries to close Winword, after changing any of the above he/she will be prompted with the error message that it can not overwrite normal.dot. No matter how you point your apps to an unique location, Winword works with user customization. I presume you have the application directory in a read-only place, where, the user will not be able to modificate anything.
I myself advocate the reduction of administration through Citrix though, Office 97 is not a Citrix / Terminal server winner. I am really sincere in saying that I'd like to be proven wrong, but I don't think it will happen in O97 case.
We have 15 farms, with 89 servers integrated with NDS. The deployment varies from ICA File to NFuse and we are getting everything under ADS and eDirectories. Everything deployed accross 12 countries. None of our deployments use mandatory profiles in Thin Client desktop scenario.
If your farm is relatively smal with a reasonable growth schedule, do a good capacity plan on a centralized resource (server), authentication strategy, have a good backup scheme and create some scripts to create accounts automatically.

 

[wilsona]

I must have missed something - surely the changes are stored in the normal.dot to which the user can freely write, not in the profile? What changes are written to the profile? The normal.dot is just a file like any other, why are user changes not able to be written to it? If mandatory profiles are not used, then global changes for all users are much more difficult to apply. Its not hard to set up the other stuff like default printers, custom dictionaries, etc.

 

[CitrixEngineer]

I agree with wilsona - don't keep ANY user files in a profile if you can help it.

 

[masai]

I agree also. Just after using mandatory profiles I can't see any advantage on it for Thin Client Desktops.

 

[DevilDog]

I support all who say that you should get away from using mandatory profiles and/or desktops. Best thing you can do is simply use published applications with policies and proper security. I did mandatory profiles for 4 years; a real pain. Anyway, if you must, than I’ll offer you my two-cents worth. (and I NEVER used compatibility scripts).
Log onto your MF server as Administrator. Execute MS Word. Go to tools\Options and the File Locations tab. Here modify the path for User Templates to point to the users home(working dir) such as H:\Office97\templates. In addition to this I also modified the following:

User Templates = H:\Office97\templates
Documents = H:\Personal or H:\My Documents
User Options = H:\Office97
AutoRecover files = H:\Personal or H:\My Documents
Startup = H:\Office97\WrdStart

All other settings should be common and point to something under ‘local drive’\**\Office97\…

Close Word and reopen. Verify that in Word the path still points to H:\**** and not \\servername\****. If it does than you may have to go to the registry HK_C_U\Software\Microsoft\Office\version\Common\FileNew\LocalTemplates and modify the path.

Log out as Administrator. Log on as another Administrator (diff profile) and run System from the Control Panel. Here go to the User Profiles tab. If you want these changes to apply to all new users than copy the 1st Administrators profile to your Default User profile.
Modify all users accounts ‘Terminal Server Profile Path’ to point to “C:\WTSRV\profiles\Default User.MAN” You do NOT need to rename any *.dat files to *.man. Referring to the directory as .man will suffice. Now delete all user profiles from the profiles directory (be sure to leave the system profiles alone).

If you wish to apply this only to certain users than perform the profile copy from admin to users profile and modify the users accounts ‘Terminal Server Profile Path’ to point to C:\WTSRV\profiles\userID.MAN. Again, I do not believe that you will have to rename ntuser.dat to ntuser.man

It has been a while since I’ve worked with this but I believe that when your users log on for the first time and run Word they will be queried to save normal.dot . This should create a new normal.dot in their users home(working dir) specified under tools. If this doesn’t work than you might want to copy normal.dot from the server to each users H:\Office97\templates.
This should put you in the ball park. Play around with this. It should work for you… it worked for me.
-- Devil Dog --

 

[CitrixEngineer]

I've just submitted an FAQ on roaming profiles; faq48-990

It's partially a test of my own knowledge - since I did in in an hour or so during a rare lunch break, with no reference books available (consider that a disclaimer!) - as well as an attempt at providing a useful source of information that is not available anywhere else. Heck, Tek-Tips' Citrix forum now has nearly half as many members as TheThin.net, so it's about time we had some documents that are as unique as this forum!

I'd appreciate any comments or suggestions for improvements at CitrixEngineer@yahoo.co.uk (although it might take me a week or so to reply and update the FAQ!).

I hope this is of use to everyone - I plan to follow it up with one on Policies, when I get a chance.

PS, Don't forget to give it a good rating, if you think it deserves it

 

[wilsona]

Another way of doing it is to create a suitable privileged user account, make and check the changes as above, then use the administrator account to copy the profile, etc.
Afterwords, delete the user account that you used originally. This is similar to the security method level C1, where you shoot the programmers afterwards. It will stop inadvertent use of that account again. Using an administrator account can cause problems later.

 

[DevilDog]

I agree with Wilsona's modification to my solution. Having removed some more cobwebs I do recall having used a special user account as a template. Boy, it sure is dusty back there. -- Devil Dog --