Roaming Profiles. Perhaps there has never been a more controversial Windows desktop management strategy. Microsoft developed Roaming Profiles in the 90s and it was born from the recognition that users would need to login to shared systems from more than desktop in the enterprise. The intentions behind this technology were a very good thing; however, the problems that ultimately came with it were not. Long logon times, corrupt profiles, limitations to what can be roamed, profile bloat, and other challenges have ensued.

Times have changed, and today the need to decouple the user from a single desktop is more important than ever. BYOD, mobile workers, remote workers and other non-office-bound jobs have really escalated the demand for a sophisticated  alternative to Roaming Profiles. The greatest need for Roaming Profiles is in highly mobile environments, such as education institutions and hospitals. Other use cases that spring to mind are retail,  transportation, military and law enforcement. In fact, any kind of job where the worker is performing the majority of their work in field operations. Roaming Profiles are also dictated by some technology architectures as well. For example, server based computing environments such as terminal services and Citrix XenApp environments mandate a roamed profile across multiple servers. But traditional Microsoft Roaming Profiles and basic profile management  solutions were never designed to handle the complexities of users logging in from multiple venues, on different devices at different times.

So, by now it’s pretty obvious that the answer to whether you need an alternative to Roaming Profiles is “Yes!”  The good news is that ProfileUnity not only provides an alternative that gets you out from under the issues, you also gain automation and control over your users in many more significant ways.

I delivered a highly attended webinar with Microsoft industry expert Greg Shields not long ago and a recording of it has been posted. In this presentation we talk about how taking a holistic approach to user management is a substantially better alternative to Roaming Profiles and basic profile solutions.

Here is a link to the webinar. Invest just an hour to watch this presentation and you will learn how ProfileUnity can enable you to:

¢ Reduce Login times by up to 95%
¢ Eliminate Profile Corruption
¢ Granularly Manage Profile Settings
¢ Manage XP, Win 7, and Win 8 Profiles as one
¢ Employ Context Aware Settings for Printer Management and more!

And, if you are inspired to try ProfileUnity – it’s never been easier. No need to download and install. Take Test Drive of ProfileUnity to experience all of the benefits that a full User Management solution can offer!