Enter ProfileNurse - Your Skilled Profile Care Professional

User Profiles
Published Dec 17, 2008 Updated Oct 26, 2010

Enter ProfileNurse - Your Skilled Profile Care Professional

User profiles can be bitchy. A single misbehaving profile is bad enough, but what if you have hundreds or thousands of them? Most admins have a boatload of profiles strewn across file servers, and no way of knowing anything about them because they are lacking the management tools. That’s where ProfileNurse comes in, a free tool for offline profile management. It can not only manipulate arbitrary settings stored in profiles but also gather different kinds of information about each profile on a file server.

ProfileNurse was developed by two recently hired programmers at sepago, Holger Adam and Michael Nolden. When they needed a “toy project” to learn the ropes the topic “offline profile management” came up quickly. But what does “offline profile management” actually mean?

Offline Profile Management

Although there are several solutions on the market that try to improve the way Windows user profiles work, all of them are online tools. They plug into Windows’ logon and logoff processes somehow, do their magic and then hide again where they came from. But what about those millions of roaming profiles out in the wild not optimized by some online profile management solution? Would it not be great to be able to…

…modify the user registry hive contained in each profile?
…apply changes to the file system, like adding or removing links on the desktop?
…query for the existence of certain files or registry values?
…get the size of specific folders or even registry keys?
…delete stale data that unnecessarily bloats a profile?

ProfileNurse can do all of that and more. It works on all or only specific roaming profiles located on a file server on the network. It generates detailed log files. Multiple operations can be combined and processed together. I could go on and on and on…

And - did I mention it is completely free?

Download ProfileNurse here.

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