Final Thoughts

In this chapter, you learned about the three profile types: Local, Roaming, and Mandatory.

Local Profiles alone are great for only the smallest of environments. However, remember that there's a lot you can do to get a similar look and feel for when new users show up on the job. You can craft a Default Local User Profile, or, even better, a Default Domain User Profile.

Step up to Roaming Profiles when you have even a handful of users and you want to allow them to bounce from machine to machine and keep their look and feel. Roaming Profiles have really grown up since the days of Windows NT. The algorithm to move the profiles up and back is much improved, and you should really give it another try if you once gave up in frustration.

Roaming Profiles are especially useful if you want to bring users' desktops and laptops back from the dead, as we'll explore in the next two chapters. Indeed, you can use Roaming Profiles as a handy way to upgrade users' machines while preserving their Desktops.

Remember that the Windows 2003 version of the Active Directory Users And Computers tool allows you to select multiple users at once and set their roaming profile path to a server. And, as stated earlier, there's no need to precreate the folder underneath the shared directory the system will automatically do that once the %username% variable is encountered .

As stated earlier, there are a lot of policy settings you can utilize to hone how profiles work. You can set up your environment to be moderately secure when using the Delete Cached Copies of Roaming Profiles policy setting. And you can allow joint ownership of the user's roaming profile directory on the server by utilizing the Add the Administrators Security Group to Roaming User Profiles policy setting.

Use Mandatory Profiles sparingly. With Group Policy settings available to tie down all sorts of settings, Mandatory Profiles are really only a last resort. And Forced Mandatory Profiles are a really, really last resort (if that's such a thing).