Managing User Profiles And Home Folders

By Author: Lucy Brown
Total Articles: 58
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Best Practices for User Profiles
The following are the best practices for handling user profiles:
Allow for different hardware configurations.Use the same type of video hardware when you create or edit a user profile for a single user.Create a single mandatory user profile for a group of users only if they all use computers with the same type of video hardware.Do not use Offline Folder caching on roaming user profile shared directories. Oth?erwise, you could experience synchronization problems when both Offline Fold?ers and the roaming user profile attempt to synchronize the files in a user's profile.Do not use Encrypted File System (EPS) on files in a roaming user profile. EPS is not compatible with roaming user profiles.Do not set disk quotas too low for users with roaming user profiles. Otherwise, the roaming user profile synchronization might fail.
When creating a roaming profile shared directory, limit access to only those users who need access. Only give users the minimum amount of permissions needed. When creating the shared directory, hide it by putting free Microsoft exam papers ...
... after the share name. This hides the shared directory from casual browsers and it will not be visible in My Network Places.
Use servers running Windows 2000 or later to host roaming user profile shared directories. Security features in Windows 2000 and the Windows Server MCSE 2003 family can help to secure a user's data.
Always use the NTFS file system for volumes holding users' data. NTFS supports discretionary access control lists (DACLs) and system access control lists (SACLs), which control who can perform operations on a file and what events will trigger logging of actions performed on a file.
A home folder is an additional folder that you can provide for users to store personal documents, and for older applications, it is sometimes the default folder for saving doc?uments. You can store a home folder on a client computer or in a shared folder on a file server. Because a home folder is not part of a roaming user profile, its size does not affect network traffic during the logon process. You can locate 70-297 all users' home folders in a central location on a network server. Storing all home folders on a file server pro?vides the following advantages:
Users can gain access to their home folders from any client computer on the network.The backing up and administration of user documents is centralized.The home folders are accessible from a client computer running any Microsoft operating system (including MS-DOS, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows 2000, and Windows Server 2003).