Choosing System Policies or Mandatory User Profiles

You can use either system policies or mandatory user profiles to enforce user settings. In certain situations, it may be desirable to use both system policies and mandatory user profiles. Table 7.1 illustrates how the two features differ.

Table 7.1 Differences between system policies and mandatory user profiles

Mandatory user profiles	System polices

Allow you to mandate only user-specific settings.	Allow you to mandate user-specific, computer-specific, and group-specific settings.
Control every user-specific setting.	Allow you to selectively determine a subset of user settings to control; users control their own remaining settings.

Note

Family members or coworkers can also control their own individual settings on the same computer through the Users option in Control Panel. See online Help for more information.

Before implementing user profiles, consider the following issues:

Do you want to use system policies for user settings? If so, you must enable user profiles on the computer.
What do you want to include in user profiles? For example, you might choose to include the desktop, Start menu, or Network Neighborhood in the user profile.
Do you want user profiles to work across the network so that they are available to roaming users? If so, the computers must be running a 32-bit, protected-mode network client. Also, you must make sure that each user has a home directory on the network.
Should mandatory user profiles be used? If so, you must copy the necessary files to each user’s home directory.
Important
If you want to specify desktop, shell, and security settings for your organization as they relate to the Internet Explorer (IE) browsing software or any part of the IE suite, use the Internet Explorer 4.0 Administration Kit (IEAK) which is available at the IEAK Web site at http://ieak.microsoft.com/. The IEAK Profile Manager controls system policies, however, it does not control user profiles as discussed in this chapter. For more information about the IEAK Profile Manager, see Chapter 6, "Configuring the Active Desktop and Active Channels" and Chapter 20, "Internet Access and Tools."