Filtered articles: "UPM"

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?

In one of my previous articles I explained how Windows handles folder views and how to preserve these settings for network shares when using roaming profiles across multiple machine. A reader has pointed me to the fact that the described behaviour seems to have changed beginning with Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.

A user environment usually includes one or more network drives used to store data and exchange documents. Over time many different types of files are located on these shares and many make use of different views for individual folders (details, list, small and large symbols to name a few) to present the contained files in the most appropriate way.

But due to the design of roaming profiles, Microsoft has decided to not preserve these folder views in most situations. This restriction does not become apparent in environments deploying fat clients because users do not work on different machine regularly. When using Terminal Services to deliver workspaces, users often switch servers due to load balancing across all members of the farm. Every time a users logs on to the next server, all views for folders accessed through a drive letter assignment are erased. It is assumed that these locations may not be the same when working on a different machine. But in a standardized environment using Terminal Services, all servers are configured identical. In addition, the user is provided with several network shares (accessed through a standardized drive letter) to access company resources and his personal data. Therefore, this measure is antiquated.