Supporting Users Who Travel Between Computers

Setting up roaming user profiles for a Windows NT network involves two steps on the server side:

1. Create a shared Profiles folder on the server to store roaming user profiles.
2. Update client user profiles to point to the shared Profiles folder.

 Tip    Use a file server, rather than your Primary Domain Controller (PDC), to store user profiles. Using a file server helps you balance the workload without straining the resources on your PDC.

After you update the profile information to point to that shared folder, the profile is retrieved automatically when the user logs on, and updated automatically when the user logs off. This retrieving and updating process is called reconciling the user profile.

Create a Profiles folder on the server

The Profiles folder stores all your roaming user profiles on an NTFS drive on the server. Make sure your traveling users have full control permissions to their subfolders so they can update their profiles whenever they change. However, do not give users access to any subfolders other than their own.

 Note    Do not create the Profiles folder in the %Systemroot% directory on your server. If you use %Systemroot%\Profiles, the client computer uses the local profile instead of the server copy.

Update client user profiles to point to the Profiles folder

You update all your client user profiles on the PDC server.

To update user profile information for each traveling user

1. On the PDC server, click Start, point to Programs, point to Administrative Tools (Common), and then click User Manager for Domains.
2. In the list of user names, double-click a user name.
3. In the User Properties box, click Profile.
4. In the User Profile Path box, type the full path to the Profiles folder you created (Windows NT Workstation client).

   – or –

   Under Home Directory, in the Local Path box, type the full path to the Profiles folder you created (Windows 95/98 client).

   For example, \\Servername\Subfoldername\Profiles.

 Note    These steps are different for Windows 2000 Server. For information about updating user profile information for each user on Windows 2000 Server, see the Windows 2000 Server documentation.

See also

For additional information about setting up roaming user profiles on your Windows NT network, see the Windows NT Server 4.0 Resource Kit.

You can set profile information for all of the users in your organization at once by using a system policy. For more information about system policies, see Managing Users' Options with System Policies.