Final Thoughts

IntelliMirror is a multiple-pronged approach to desktop management. In the previous chapter, you set up Roaming Profiles, which enable users' desktops to follow them on whatever workstation they use.

In this chapter, you set up Redirected Folders, which anchored the My Documents folder (among others) to the server. This gave you several key features: a centralized backup place for critical files, the ability for users' My Documents contents to be available on any workstation, and the ability to mitigate the generated traffic caused by My Documents being located within the profile. By default, the My Documents folder is located within the profile.

You also set up Offline Folders and the Synchronization Manager so that files work offline as though they were online. You used Group Policy to specify how your users and computers would use this function. Don't forget to use the Administratively Assigned Offline Files policy setting when necessary to force the My Documents folder of your Windows 2000 clients to be pinned especially for your laptop users. Recall that My Documents are already automatically pinned if you use Windows XP.

Windows XP/Service Pack 2 adds some additional hacks you can perform to squelch some noise generated by Offline Files (see KB 811660).

Last, you used quotas to mitigate how much disk space your users can eat on any given volume.

In the next chapter, we'll continue our IntelliMirror journey. We'll learn how to distribute software to our users and computers. So, turn the page and get started!