Immidio Flex Profiles 7.5
- Details
- Published: Thursday, 20 October 2011
Introduction
Profiles are still one of the biggest challenges within Front-End infrastructures. Almost every system administrator has experienced problems with any of the profile types made available by Microsoft.
Roaming Profiles get corrupted or contain faulty settings, which can only be solved by removing the complete profile and (let the user) reconfigure the user environment from scratch consuming a lot of time and causing frustration. Also roaming profiles are often causing long logon times, because the whole profile needs to be copied from the network to the desktop (and vice versa).
Mandatory profiles were the popular alternative, but nowadays users do not accept that personal configured settings are not retained when the user logs on the next time. Also Microsoft is not a "fan" of this profile type and has been discouraging the use of the mandatory profile for a while. Actually they are right in that, because several more complex settings can not be used in combination with mandatory profiles, a good example is SSL/certificate related topics.
A local profile does not have the disadvantages of the roaming and mandatory profiles, however as the name implies the profile is for one desktop only. So when users log on to another desktop they have to reconfigure the settings again every time they use another desktop. With current flexible workplaces and working anytime from anyplace users are moving between desktops a lot, so a local profile is also not an option.
Taking a look back none of the Microsoft profile solutions fully fits the current requirements for the users keeping the user settings while not having the challenges with long logon times and profile corruption. Therefore the so called flex or hybrid profiles were developed starting with the freeware tool Flex Profile Kit. The first versions were based on the concept that the IT department defines which registry information and user profile folders and files should be retained for the user and were saved at logoff and restored when the user logs on.