[randallsquared]

We had this for meeting rooms at a previous job. It worked quite poorly, since it took a long time to pull in your profile. Meeting runners learned to get to the thirty-minute meeting ten minutes early so that there was some hope of being able to use the computer for part of the meeting. Also, the Windows profiles we were using didn't include applications, so there was the fun of each person who needed, say, Skype, or Chrome, downloading it onto each computer that they hadn't previously used it on.

[marcosdumay]

The university I went on used a similar setup, and pulling the profile took no time.

I don't know what's wrong with corporate enviroments, that Windows profiles take so long to roam. That seems to be true to all of them. Also, corporate IT has an extremely irrational aversion to simply installing the software on all the computers for once. Even when it's free software, or things that everybody uses. That also repeats everywhere.

[fred_durst]

I remember from the old days when I used to deal with this. It was most often a case of people putting a lot of big files on their Windows desktops.

Certain people refused to put their big files on the network share because they said it took to long to load and then complained that their roaming profiles took to long to load because they had those big files on their desktop.

[dredmorbius]

The fact that MS platform management separates user capabilities (profiles) from platform capabilities (applications, installed and managed per-host) results in some particularly painful characteristics.

This is where the ability to have automatically configured (puppet / chef / ansible / cfengine) clusters of servers for 'Nix hosts, or NFS-mounted /usr, so much more powerful.