I have a mostly-positive experience of roaming profiles. As an
administrator, you have to be disciplined (e.g. be concious of whether
shortcuts are being placed in the user's profile or the "all users" profile
on the machine) and consistent. Both of these are good things, but without
them you can hit problems using roaming profiles.
Mistakes I've seen others make with roaming profiles are:
* Setting the profile path to be the same as the home directory. As the
user starts to put documents in their his home directory, they are all
copied back and forth between the server and workstation at each logon and
logoff.
* Not redirecting My Documents out of the profile (use group policy for
this).
* Not limiting the size of profiles. Group Policy (and System Policy before
it) have policies for restricting the size of profiles. An example that
comes to mind is a user copying a 100Mb video file to his desktop and then
wondering why his login was very slow across a 2Mb leased line. You also
need to educate your users that storing documents on the desktop is a bad
thing (or stop them doing it with file ACLs).
* No consistency between workstations. I have always recommended putting
effort into developing a workstation build process. The more automated the
better and the less the workstation is the result of the personal
preferences of the techie who build the machine the better. If all the
program shortcuts and locations are different between machines you can
expect hiccups. If your environment has every version of Windows ever
released then you can't expect to have a good time with profiles.
* Keeping the Office templates stored in c:\program files\microsoft
office\templates. There are some ADM files in the Office Resource Kit. Use
them. You might be surprised by the number of user preferences that are
stored here.
As I mentioned above, roaming profiles go hand in hand with folder
redirection. Don't even think about deploying roaming profiles without also
deploying folder redirection.
If you have a lot of programs that store their user settings in
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, then you are going to see problems when users roam.
These problems are the fault of the software vendor. Don't let them tell
you otherwise and don't let them tell you that the registry is the cause of
the problem. It's their lack of understanding as programmers that is the
problem. I still see far too many dumb software vendors storing user
preferences here.
If you have a lot of slow WAN links in your environment you may not like
user profiles.
A while ago, traditional roaming profiles were being portrayed as being
passe. The story was that you could just redirect all the folders using
roaming profiles to achieve the same effect. To my mind, that's just not
true. You lose all the user settings that are stored in HKEY_CURRENT_USER.
If your users are happy reconnecting Outlook to their Exchange mailbox when
they log into a new machine for the first time then it may not be a problem.
However, if you suspect that they will put a call into the helpdesk then
simple file redirection without roaming profiles is probably not for you.
Also, be aware that some programs store files in the profile directory.
Of course, with properly-implemented roaming profiles and an automated
workstation build (automation is more valuable for creating consistency than
raw speed, in my opinion, although both are valuable) replacing a failed
computer is generally as simple as just replacing the box and logging the
new user in.
If the reason for failure is a hard disk failure then you have saved your
user losing all his profile settings and possibly some of his documents.
Above all, though, you need to ensure your techies have a good understanding
of profiles and things like the "User Shell Folders" registry key. Also, be
aware that the "Local Settings" folder doesn't (or shouldn't) roam with the
profile. Things like the Outlook Express mail store live in here. Other
applications, especially those that store large user-specific files, may be
putting things in here.
Hope this helps
Oli
