The management is telling him (i wasn't there for the meeting) that they want their team of interns (3-10 of them depending on season) to be able to use any workstation that is available.  Their area for interns looks like a computer lab.  Obviously many of them set their desktops, outlook, toolbars, favorites, etc. to meet their own needs.
I was thinking roaming profiles for this team of interns. While most of them have favorite workstations also, so they will often log into the same one day to day. The core of the network is two 24 port regular non-managed 3com 10/100 speed switches daisy chained together. The profiles will be stored on one server, and while it has a giga NIC, most of the workstations do not, and the other IT guy has said we have spent all the money budgeted for upgrades on the server itself and a new accounting package, so the switches couldn't be replaced anyways.
The question is, how much strain would roaming profiles make on this network? And just to make sure, unless I make the registry changes, the profiles are generally cached and only updated, versus always downloading everything correct? Also how do we prevent these users from saving files to the desktop to keep their profiles smaller? Also, what is a normal size for a profile to be anyways? Thanks a million guys. Both myself and the other tech think this would be the easiest for all parties involved, but since neither of us have much experience using them, I wanted to hear from the AT community to gather more info, hopefully on people who actually implement roaming profiles...
edit:
oh, I am also basing this off of this article:
Roaming profiles...
			
			I was thinking roaming profiles for this team of interns. While most of them have favorite workstations also, so they will often log into the same one day to day. The core of the network is two 24 port regular non-managed 3com 10/100 speed switches daisy chained together. The profiles will be stored on one server, and while it has a giga NIC, most of the workstations do not, and the other IT guy has said we have spent all the money budgeted for upgrades on the server itself and a new accounting package, so the switches couldn't be replaced anyways.
The question is, how much strain would roaming profiles make on this network? And just to make sure, unless I make the registry changes, the profiles are generally cached and only updated, versus always downloading everything correct? Also how do we prevent these users from saving files to the desktop to keep their profiles smaller? Also, what is a normal size for a profile to be anyways? Thanks a million guys. Both myself and the other tech think this would be the easiest for all parties involved, but since neither of us have much experience using them, I wanted to hear from the AT community to gather more info, hopefully on people who actually implement roaming profiles...
edit:
oh, I am also basing this off of this article:
Roaming profiles...
 
				
		 
			 
 
		 
 
		 
 
		 
 
		 
 
		
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