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How to make e-mail available from any pc

By bradq ·
Hi. We have a Windows 2000 Server with about 40 client computers. When a user logs on to a computer for the first time it doesn't have their Internet e-mail or Exchange Server setup on it. You have to go around and set them up manually on every computer they log in to. How do you make it so that its available no matter where they log in? Do you use group policy or some kind of roaming user profile and how?

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by TechKid In reply to How to make e-mail availa ...

Are they using Outlook XP or Outlook 2000? If so, you need to download the Office Resource Kit from Microsoft's site and create a custom .MST file. Then you include that in your Office GPO.

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by shmaltz In reply to How to make e-mail availa ...

What TechKid is saying is just part of the solution, and helps if you don't have a profile set up on the machine or if a romaing profile doesn't exist (usualy a new user). The rest of the story is like you guessed you configure Romaing Profiles. Check on MS site on how to do it, here is the basic steps:
1. In Active Directory user properties under the profile tab make sure the Profile Path box reflects a subfolder in a share on your network (i.e. \\server\share\username). The subfolder doens't have to exist, the next time the user logs on it will be created. You can select multiple users and assign this property by using the %username% variable for the subfolder.
2. Create a share on a server and on the share lever grant everyone Full Access.
3. On the file/folder level grant the following access (use the advance tab): A. Uncheck the box which tells you to inherit permissions. B. Check the box to reset permissions to all child objects (make sure it is empty). C. Grant the Domain Admin group full permission, and make sure that it goes to this folder and subfolder and files. D. Grant the Everyone group full permissions. E. Grant the Owner/Crator group full permissions.

Continued.....

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by shmaltz In reply to

....Continued.

The next time a user logs on to a machine the following will happen:
The logon process will check for the Profile Path property and will check if the path exists.
If it does; it chekc to see if there is also a profile on the local machine. If there is one on the local machine it checks if the modify date of the profile match, if it matches it opens up the local profile, if it doesn't match it downloads the remote profile. If there is no local profile on the machine the remote profile is downloaded.
If there is no remote profile (the folder specified by the profile path doesn't exist), then it checks if there is a local profile, if there is one then it uses the local one. If there is no local profile and no remote profile, then it will create one by first checking if a default profile exists in the parent dirctory of the profile path, if it does it uses that, if it does not then it uses the local default profile.

When the user logs off the profile will be copied to the profile path, if the user is logged in to more then one machine the machine from which the user logs off last will overwrithe the previous profile, which can create a problem: if document a and b exist in the profile, and the user logs on to computer a and b, edits document a on computer a and document b on computer b. Closes these files and logs off from both computers and from computer b after computer a, then all changes made to document a will be lost. that's where redirected folders and/or home directories come in handy.
Hope this helps.

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by bradq In reply to How to make e-mail availa ...

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