Hi, I have just taken over a little network of about 20 machines. This is my first time managing a network. I have been asked to implement roaming profiles so that everything gets backed up to the server. I have done a little bit of reasearch today on the subject and was wondering if some people could give me a few tips and hints. Basically my aim is to create a default user profile where everyone has the same desktop applied to them when I create a new user. What is the best way of doing this? anything I should know about the permissions on the server for redirecting the my documents folder etc. Any help will be greatly appreciated as I don't want to fiddle about too much.

I think you can do it by specifying the profile path like \\servername\sharename\username in the profile section of the user properties in Ad users and computers in AD server. With regards, S. Radha http://www.salem-radha.com

Your best bet would be to google "roaming profiles" and "mandatory profiles". The results should give you a good start. I wouldn't recommend going any further until you completely familiarise yourself with how the above two work. If you don't really know what you're doing before you start then you can end up getting into serious problems - peoples documents and setttings being overwritten and lost for example. Best thing to do would be to create a couple of test accounts, follow some guides online - of which there are thousands - and then once you're happy you know what you're doing, move everyone else across.

Cheers, I have set up a few test accounts today. They appear to be working. I have set up a standard desktop which appears to be applied to each user. I have mapped drives to these via a GPO. My next question is that in AD i have set up a location for profiles does this redirect peoples My Documents as well or do I need to redirect these seperately via the folder redirection GPO. Thanks for your help.

The profile contains everything; my documents, favorites, desktop, application data, everything. So, if your just giving everyone roaming profiles you won't need to redirect. Holy Wow.

Yeah, but it takes to long to upload and download my profile due to My Documents as some people have large files.

you can set a restriction on the size of the profile within GPO in your domain policy.i restrict mine to 10MB that way you dont flood your network with tons of data and it doesnt take ages for a users profile to be loaded from your profile server because its so large.once the profile has exceeded its storage space they`ll be prompted to clear it.