Re: Roaming Profiles Issue - Windows Server 2003

Aaron <bikefaster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

<snipped for length>

Thank you for your quick response to my issues regarding the roaming
profiles. I understand that you like Folder Redirection and suggest
that is the way to go. I am however rather hesistant as I don't want
to have all that information on our servers.

Ah...then perhaps you really don't want all that information on any computer
on your *network* at all. This is a common enough company policy.

We only want company
information pertinent to work to be on the servers. As of now we have
about 70 users on the network. The amount of information that has been
copied over due to the roaming profiles ie. desktop and my documents
is rather large and overwhelming.

I can imagine! I'll also bet users are seeing some really long login times.

You dismissed excluding folders in
the profile saying, "if you use properly configured folder
redirection, it's moot."

Re My Documents & Desktop, yes.

How do I configure it properly? So that I
don't have all the needless data

....get the needless data off your network entirely.

. Loss data certainly is not pretty,
but what is key is the company critical data. And by enforcing
employees to copy those critical files to their personal home folder I
feel that it has accomplished what we want.

I think you're going to end up with a mess - can pretty much guarantee that
a lot of new data will continue to go into your now entirely
unmanaged/backed up local My Documents folders.

Truthfully, if I had my way I would agree with you in an attempt to
save all the data. However, I am working with an "IT Dept" that is
set on only have the "critical data" (whatever that means)

You'll want to make sure that "critical data" is clearly defined. IT needs
to implement policies devised by *management* - not in a vacuum, by an
admin.

and nothing
more. I know that roaming profiles work well if they are small and
that is the goal of making these changes. You never mentioned what was
wrong with using "Exclude directories in roaming profile"?

Well - I like to use My Documents. Since most Windows apps respect that
path, it's the easiest way to get your users to store data in a single place
by default. And My Documents redirection to the server ensures that when a
user saves or opens files, they're looking at the server. I usually redirect
it to the home directory, but if you wanted, you could direct it to a shared
folder too (but watch out for unwanted subfolders getting created).

As of now,
there is no way that I'm going to keep people's desktops (not after
the 3.5 GB one I saw today).

Youch! I think there's a training issue here too.

Is there are way to place a quota on just
the desktop?

Not with MS built in stuff - there are third party quota management tools,
tho. Google should be useful there.

If so, then I would be willing to keep it and not
exclude. With regards to My Docs, I really don't care to keep people's
music and videos.

Nor should you - so I think the question is, why are people allowed to store
them at all?

I appreciate all of your help and advice about
getting this to work properly and look forward to hearing from you.

Thank you,
Aaron

As a wise man said, "There are seldom good technological solutions to
behavioral problems." I suggest that before doing anything at all, you have
a discussion with management & HR. Perhaps there needs to be an announcement
made that any personal data must immediately be removed or deleted, by
such-and-such a date. I'd bet that most of your users have access to
computers at home! Right now, it sounds like there's quite a mix of business
& personal data, and any technological solution to putting it on the server
is going to put *all* of it on the server . Redirecting My Documents (and
Desktop....unless you have a very strict policy that states, "never store
any files on your desktop") will ensure that *data* is stored on the server,
where you want it stored. This is just my $.02, but what I've described is a
very standard and easy-to-support configuration.



.

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