APPDATA ROAMING MICROSOFT WORKSPACES WINDOWS 10
APPDATA ROAMING MICROSOFT WORKSPACES SOFTWARE

When you lose a user’s profile, it can often have a dramatic and disruptive effect on their working practices. It can be an integral part of that intangible metric that we call “user experience”. It’s important to treat the user’s profile with a bit of respect. Logon issues, file type associations, and view settings made up the lion’s share of these problems.

APPDATA ROAMING MICROSOFT WORKSPACES WINDOWS 10

In a Windows 10 migration I did, user profile-related issues accounted for a very large percentage of calls to the service desk in the three months after implementation.

There has been a tendency to relegate profiles and profile issues to the “meh” end of priority, but in my opinion, as something that is intrinsically tied to the user’s perception of their systems, you should disregard them at your peril. User profile issues are a lot more common than you think and you’d be surprised how much of a dramatic effect they can have on user experience. We may adapt as the years go on to a newer way of addressing the profile, but unless every vendor is willing to store our user settings and preferences wholesale on their systems, we will at least see some user profile items hanging around for the foreseeable future.

APPDATA ROAMING MICROSOFT WORKSPACES SOFTWARE

However, we still use desktop PCs where installed software often interacts quite heavily with other applications, so I don’t think that the user profile, on a whole, will ever fully go away.

This is the model commonly used with mobile applications too, so as we move further on, expect the user profile to become less all-encompassing that it has been in the past. nk2 extension, but it now sits at the “back end” with the user mailbox. For instance, the nickname file in Outlook (the file that auto-fills your email addresses based around people you’ve already emailed) used to be stored in a file with an. Now, more modern software, especially SaaS and other cloud-based services, have taken to storing the “profile” at the “server end” of things these days, which eliminates a lot of problems that we have traditionally encountered around this device-based global user profile. It holds all sorts of data – views, shortcuts, wallpapers, screen savers, colour schemes, supplementary files, dictionaries, signatures, auto-complete files, MRU lists, cookies, history, toolbars, autotext, connection settings the list could go on and on.

In my eyes, the profile is created where applications, data and configuration items intersect, a collection of Registry and filesystem artefacts that are bound to the individual user’s session and shape the environment within that. So what precisely is the “Windows user profile”? It is essentially a set of configuration items that represent the characteristics, the “personality” of the user. So rather than ruin the reference to it in his post by back-burning it for ages in my usual fashion, I thought I’d better get on and do it, for once. During aforementioned conversation I promised to write up my “history of Windows profiles” presentation I did a couple of years ago. Last week James Kindon, a fellow CTP and an affable guy who often chews the fat with me on Slack whilst he is clearly burning gallons of midnight oil, wrote a blog post about Windows profiles in 2019, which we had some chatter about prior to publication. I’ve been told I bang on about Windows profiles a lot.

Appdata roaming microsoft workspaces