Filtered articles: "User Profile Whitepaper"

We all know that it is trendy to use a profile solution to rid Windows of some shortcomings of roaming profiles. And quite a number of you have looked at Citrix Profile Management (also known as User Profile Manager). In its current incarnation, UPM is configured using a group policy specifying the profile path. But similar to utilizing the "Set path for TS Roaming Profiles" for Terminal Services (soon to be Remote Desktop Services), this introduces the limitation that all users logging on to a server receive the same profile path – most most likely with some dynamically substituted components like environment variables or, in the case of UPM, fields from the user object in Active Directory.

Unfortunately, both solutions (UPM and "Set path for TS Roaming Profiles") are inferior to managing profile paths in Active Directory user objects. The latter enables administrators to distribute users across several servers or use components representing an organisational affiliation. Wouldn't it be neat to combine those to methods of maintaining profile paths?

I have recently had the chance to write an article for a German journal called LANline. The article focuses on user profile management and why modern approaches of application delivery create the need for a user profile management solution.

The article can be read in the printed issue published in October 2008.

The whitepaper about user profile management has been available for several months and has reached an astonishing number of downloads. Due to the evolving strategies for delivering applications as well as desktops, we decided to expand on the issue of evaluating user profile management solutions and the subtleties involved in this process.