cleverhandle
Diamond Member
The idea of Roaming Profiles always seems great to me, but I don't like the default local profile created by workstations. So far I've seen two solutions, neither of them elegant or efficient...
1) Tweak a profile, and copy it back to the "Default User" profile on the workstation. That profile is then used as the base for the Roaming Profile when the user first logs in. This is easy to do once - before you roll out a workstation image. But making changes to it afterwards is impossible.
2) Create a "Profile" account for the purpose of setting the default profile. Log in, make changes, and log out. Log back in as an administrator and use System-->Advanced-->User Profiles to copy the default profile into the proper place for a new regular user. This allows to change your defaults as your needs change, without requiring any changes to the workstations. But it's slow - not practical for dealing with large numbers of users.
I guess what I'd like is some way to automate #2. Merely copying the default profile folder through Explorer didn't work. Even after playing around with permissions (which is also slow), the profile didn't work correctly. I suspect there's more to the profile copying than just permissions, and the "Copy Profile" action in #2 is doing some other things behind the scenes. Is there a command line utility that would accomplish the same thing? Or some other trick to accomplish this?
1) Tweak a profile, and copy it back to the "Default User" profile on the workstation. That profile is then used as the base for the Roaming Profile when the user first logs in. This is easy to do once - before you roll out a workstation image. But making changes to it afterwards is impossible.
2) Create a "Profile" account for the purpose of setting the default profile. Log in, make changes, and log out. Log back in as an administrator and use System-->Advanced-->User Profiles to copy the default profile into the proper place for a new regular user. This allows to change your defaults as your needs change, without requiring any changes to the workstations. But it's slow - not practical for dealing with large numbers of users.
I guess what I'd like is some way to automate #2. Merely copying the default profile folder through Explorer didn't work. Even after playing around with permissions (which is also slow), the profile didn't work correctly. I suspect there's more to the profile copying than just permissions, and the "Copy Profile" action in #2 is doing some other things behind the scenes. Is there a command line utility that would accomplish the same thing? Or some other trick to accomplish this?
