Folder Redirection

This is a guest post by Bryan Chriscoli, who implemented an innovative alternative to folder redirection with the help of symbolic links, AppSense products and PowerShell scripting. All credit goes to him.

This is the fifth in a series of articles on folder redirection by Aaron Parker, Helge Klein and Shawn Bass. Part one: How Folder Redirection Impacts UX & Breaks Applications Part two: Visualizing the Impact of Folder Redirection – Logon and Application Launch Part three: Visualizing the Impact of Folder Redirection – Start Menu Search Part four: Measuring the Impact of Folder Redirection – User Logon Part five: this article Previously on this Series If you have been following this mini-series you know that after explaining the basics in part one we got to the juicy bits in parts two and three, where we presented videos that vividly show that folder redirection indeed speeds up user logons considerably, but at the price of potentially horrible user experience during the session. In part four Aaron Parker published our measurements of how folder redirection affects logon duration. This fifth part is about the effect folder redirection and SMB version can have on application launch speed.

This is the third in a series of articles on folder redirection by Aaron Parker, Helge Klein and Shawn Bass. Part one: How Folder Redirection Impacts UX & Breaks Applications Part two: Visualizing the Impact of Folder Redirection – Logon and Application Launch Part three: this article Part four: Measuring the Impact of Folder Redirection – User Logon Previously on this Series If you have been following this mini-series you know that after explaining the basics in part one we got to the juicy bits in part two, where Aaron Parker presented videos that vividly show that folder redirection indeed speeds up user logons considerably, but at the price of potentially horrible user experience during the session. In this third part we are going to explore that in more detail.

This is the first in a series of articles on folder redirection by Aaron Parker, Helge Klein and Shawn Bass. Part one: this article Part two: Visualizing the Impact of Folder Redirection – Logon and Application Launch Part three: Visualizing the Impact of Folder Redirection – Start Menu Search Part four: Measuring the Impact of Folder Redirection – User Logon Why Even Talk About Folder Redirection - in 2014!?! Working in the SBC/VDI space without stumbling across folder redirection is about as easy as travelling from Europe to the US as an IP packet without going through a Cisco router.

Windows Offline Files have a bad reputation. Many an administrator can tell a story where Offline Files caused issues that sometimes even required a reinstallation of the affected PC. But Microsoft has gradually improved the functionality and ironed out many of the bugs. Today - in Windows 7 SP1 with all post-SP1 fixes - Offline Files is a technology that still has its problems, but can be used in production - if you are adventurous. This article lists the gotchas I am aware of.

This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. One of the problems inherent to roaming user profiles is that they are copied to the local computer during logon. That takes time. Hence the motivation to limit the size of user profiles. One way of doing that is to put a quota on them, another one is folder redirection. Although widely used, redirection has its problems; problems so grave that Shawn Bass started to campaign against using folder redirection altogether. In this article I describe why Shawn despises redirection, which alternatives are available now what we can hope for in the future.

This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. Redirecting AppData from the user profile to a folder on the network may significantly improve logon speed. Is enabling AppData redirection a no-brainer, then? Not really, because it often comes at a price: performance.

This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. This article tries list the dos and don’ts that need to be considered when creating a user profile design. It focuses on functionality built into Windows. Third-party solutions that replace or complement the operating system’s capabilities will be the topic of future articles.

This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. Roaming user profiles tend to grow over time, which is sometimes referred to as profile bloat. In and by itself, profile growth is not a problem. Users of desktop PCs who log on the the same machine every day will not even notice that they have huge profiles ready to follow them around the network. Their locally cached copy of the roaming profile is always current. No need to fetch anything from a file server during logon.