What is Managed Profile?
Managed Profile is an administrative tool for managing profiles in Windows and desktop corporate environments where multiple users share workstations. By combining the advantages of both mandatory and roaming profiles, Managed Profile provides a superior solution for greater profile stability, flexibility and control and hassle-free user profile management.
Mandatory and Roaming Profiles
Mandatory profiles have the advantage that they are read only and therefore less susceptible to corruption while at the same time they can be centrally administered. However they are not suited to environments where users require different profile structures or need to customize aspects of their profiles.
On the other hand, roaming profiles provide the flexibility required for users to be able to customize their own settings but can be prone to corruption when allowed to grow to unmanageable sizes. In certain environments settings can also be lost for applications deployed on different physical servers.
The Managed Profile Solution
Managed Profile has been designed to couple the stability of mandatory profiles with the flexibility of roaming profiles and includes functionality to intelligently save and restore settings even in situations where users may have multiple instances of their profile loaded. It also includes functionality for managing registry and printer settings, desktop shortcuts, drive mappings, starting of processes during logon and logoff and the creation of explorer namespace folders. Scripts simplify the logon and logoff processes and comprehensive logging provides a clear audit trail. In short, Managed Profile offers stability, flexibility and control for effective, trouble-free management of user profiles.