Roaming Profiles, shared login and Outlook questions

[mycomputersucks]

Hey all,

I have about 20 users who currently share workstations. It is shift work so we use roaming profiles so they have access to their personal data from any workstation. however, we have a problem. people have screwed up their profiles by installing software/etc to the point where they get different results on each workstation. IE, apps will run fine on one machine, but spit out errors on the next, and the results are different for each person.

now, we are going to wipe all the profiles and start again since we just got approved for a hardware refresh. How can we set this up again? I'm thinking we could do either a shared login or even local logins, but that would cause an issue w/ outlook. We have a shared network drive which could be used for personal data and i believe we could use the network drive to host the outlook pst files, i think? is there a way to have a shared login but have outlook 2007 load separate profiles in order to keep their email data separate? same issue with all the autologin stuff. with shared logins i don't want people saving favorites or having passwords saved, that stuff can be kept on their network drive (which would have individual logins, i'm thinking).

I'm not an Active Directory/sys admin guy. any advice?

 

[gimp]

shared logins are never a good idea.

just install the same set of apps on all computers, and don't give the users admin privileges, so that they cannot install software.

I currently support 4 facilities with roaming profiles. One of those facilities has roughly 300 employees total.

We don't have that issue, because pretty much all machines have the same build/software installed.

let me add... you can create multiple "profiles" with Outlook. But then you have the issue of the users accessing their home folder. Everybody that logs in to that machine with the "shared" login would either:
A - have access to everybody's home folder, including their own.
B - have no access to any home folder.

 

[Demon10000]

Mandatory Roaming Profiles.

If you're not going to do mandatory then you need to lock your workstations down much tighter than they were before. I was an admin for a call center of about 60 people and we had so many problems.

I talked with the call center manager and explained the problems. We then worked together to come up with a profile that gave them everything they needed and converted it into a mandatory roaming profile. I then configured each user to use this mandatory profile and about 90% of all problems went away.

Yes, they bitched and complained because they had to keep setting the wallpaper back to that picture of their children, but in the end, it was a better decision for the company. I spent less time fixing their stuff and they spent more time working productively.


As said above -- don't even consider any type of shared logins. It is *not* the way to go.