Highly mobile users and roaming profiles

[Neonblue]

Ok, I've got an issue I'd like to see if anyone has the answer.

I've got 3000 workstations and 8000 users (public school). I'm looking at using roaming profiles but I'm running into an issue.

When I enable a roaming profile for a student, all seems ok initially. But when that student moves to a new computer, that profile will never pick up software that's installed on that computer. It only shows the software that was on the original computer; which makes some sense. Problem is, the licenses on most of the educational software are computer based and limited. So certain computers will have certain pieces of software loaded. I need the profile to pick up the software that's loaded on each computer (the desktop). I was thinking about just copying deleting the desktop folder and re-copying the default user over each time but I'm not sure that's the best method.

The key thing I need to do with all of this is two fold. I need to get a consistent my doc folder and I need a drive mapped directly to the user's home folder. Right now when a student browses to their home share to get to their folder, it can take 5 minutes before the flashlight goes away. I did some research on this and found that it's a documented issue on sp1 and above. It was also supposed to be fixed in sp2 but I'm still seeing it. The only way I know to map the drives directly to the user's home folder is to enable profiles.

Anyone care to share any insight?

[AdamV]

Roaming profiles and home directories are two different things, you can use home directories just by adding the relevant path to the user properties in AD, or by using scripts to map things.

However, I would suggest that for your environment it does make sense to use both (or use folder redirection instead of roaming, but there's pros and cons to each)

The answer to your problem with applications is that you need to get any relevant icons in the "All Users" profile of a machine. Default user is used to create a profile for a first-time user, not for a user with an existing profile.
If you have things on the All Users > Start menu (or desktop) they will appear for every user "merged" with their own stuff. This is perfect for apps which only reside on a few machine.

[Neonblue]

Ah. That makes a lot of sense!

The home directory though requires the profile to be set, otherwise it only maps to the directory above where the user is... I banged my head on that one for a while and found an article on Microsoft that stated profiles needed to be turned on before it would map the path directly. When I tried this, it did work. So what was happening was if I had a path:

\\server\usershare$\userdirectory

It would map to:

h:=\\server\usershare$

Then the user would have to go to H: and select their home directory.

If I set the profile on for the user, the map would be:

h:=\\server\usershare$\username and they would be placed directly in that directory.

I don't understand why this did make a difference, but it did...

I'm going to look at the all users on Monday. I wasn't even thinking along those lines. Thanks a ton for the insight!