ProfileNurse - Profile maintenance made easy

User profiles contain a lot of data and information that is more or less important to the owner of the profile. Applications leave their marks in the file system and the registry to save user specific settings. As a consequence, a profile may grow larger and larger over time. While the work environment (applications, settings, needed files, etc.) changes around the user, some data becomes obsolete and unnecessarily bloats the profile. This may not be problematic on single computers with only few users and local profiles, but it becomes a major headache in enterprise networks, where profiles typically are not bound to single machines, but roam with the user instead.

User profiles contain a lot of data and information that is more or less important to the owner of the profile. Applications leave their marks in the file system and the registry to save user specific settings. As a consequence, a profile may grow larger and larger over time. While the work environment (applications, settings, needed files, etc.) changes around the user, some data becomes obsolete and unnecessarily bloats the profile.

This may not be problematic on single computers with only few users and local profiles, but it becomes a major headache in enterprise networks, where profiles typically are not bound to single machines, but roam with the user instead.

Citrix offers the User Profile Manager as a highly efficient way to minimize the data being saved in the profile and thus being transferred. In addition to this, administrators might want to gather information about user profiles with regards to registry and file system content. They might also need to clean up user profiles from time to time to retrieve extra storage space and reduce profile sizes.

While Citrix User Profile Manager helps in accommodating users with their own profile in any working environment, user profiles must be stored on file servers in the network. This storage can contain an arbitrary number of profiles and is typically managed by less than a handful of administrators, while the number of profiles can easily add up to many thousands. Such numbers make even simple tasks difficult. Adding an icon to all profiles suddenly becomes either very labor intensive or forces administrators to fiddle with custom-built scripts.

Deleting certain files from all profiles is no less challenging. This might be required, if an administrator finds yet another directory holding temporary data - after adjusting the configuration of Citrix User Profile Manager the unwanted data needs to be deleted from all user profiles.

ProfileNurse addresses these problems with the automated execution of a series of file system and registry operations on an arbitrary number of profiles. The queue of desired actions is defined in a simple configuration file and then executed on either all or a specified set of profiles. Remember the task of putting an icon onto the desktops of all users and the amount of work involved without a tool specially designed for this kind of job. With ProfileNurse, this task adds up to just one defined operation, namely copying the appropriate .lnk file to each profile. This is the instruction for ProfileNurse to do so:

[FileSystemCopyFile]
SourcePath="x:\IconStore\NewIcon.lnk"
DestinationPath="Desktop\NewIcon.lnk

Available operations in ProfileNurse include:

• Creating and deleting registry keys and values
• Altering registry values
• Deleting files or folders
• Copying files or folders into user profiles

In addition to that, both the file system and the registry can be queried to find data with a specific combination of search criteria. Available criteria include:

• File or directory names and sizes
• File system attributes
• Registry key and value names and sizes
• Registry attributes like last write times or value types and data

An easy example might be to find all registry keys created by an application called “AppX”. To find any occurrences in all user profiles, this is the way to do it:

[RegistryQueryKeys]
Find="all"
QuerySubKeys="1"
Name="AppX*"

In summary, ProfileNurse greatly simplifies profile maintenance by automating common yet otherwise tedious operations. With ProfileNurse, any number of profiles can easily be modified, cleaned or searched. Remember though, this is a very powerful tool that might cause unintended damage, if you use it the wrong way.

Download ProfileNurse here.