Profile Management

How Profile Management works

March 15, 2023

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Profile Management addresses user profile deficiencies in environments where simultaneous domain logons by the same user introduce complexities and consistency issues to the profile. For example, if a user starts sessions to two different virtual resources based on a roaming profile, the profile of the session that terminates last overrides the profile of the first session. This problem, known as “last write wins,” discards any personalization settings that the user makes in the first session.

You can tackle the problem by using separate profiles for each resource silo. However, this approach results in increased administration overhead and storage capacity requirements. Another drawback is that users experience different settings depending on the resource silo they access.

Profile Management optimizes profiles in an easy and reliable way. At interim stages and at logoff, registry changes and the files and folders in the profile are saved to the user store for each user. If, as is common, a file exists, it is overwritten if it has an earlier time stamp.

At logon, users’ registry entries and files are copied from the user store. If a locally cached profile exists, the two sets are synchronized. As a result, all settings for all applications and silos are available during the session. And it is no longer necessary to maintain a separate user profile for each silo. Citrix streamed user profiles can further enhance logon times.

Profile Management helps to safeguard application settings for mobile users who experience network disruption (if the offline profiles features are configured) and users who access resources from different operating systems (if the cross-platform settings feature is configured).

Note: Profile Management processes domain user logons not local accounts.

For a more detailed overview of Profile Management, search the Profile Management blog on the Citrix Blogs home page.

Where network-based profiles are employed, consider adopting Profile Management in your organization. You might be able to implement other solutions such as mandatory or roaming profiles, and maintain them with standard knowledge of Microsoft Windows. However, unless your deployment is restricted (for example, a call center where user customization is limited so mandatory profiles are appropriate), Profile Management might be preferred.

Citrix recommends using folder redirection so that user-specific data is saved separately from the profile.

The home-folder and template paths must be configured only with the network location.

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How Profile Management works

March 15, 2023

Contributed by:

March 15, 2023

Contributed by:

How Profile Management works

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