When I compiled my complete Windows 7 feature overview a while back, one of the features that caught my attention was the background upload of roaming user profiles. This Windows 7 feature overview was mostly based on Microsoft’s Windows 7 reviewer’s guide of the beta version. This guide is no longer available at Microsoft Download, but you still can get it at rapidshare. Note that not everything in this paper applies to Windows 7 RTM.

This is the original text in the Windows 7 reviewer’s guide:

Windows 7 makes Roaming User Profiles more useful and reliable by enabling IT professionals to automatically synchronize users’ profiles with the server while users are still logged on. Prior to Windows 7, this synchronization occurred only when users logged off. With this improvement, users can roam from one PC to another while remaining logged in to both PCs—and still have the same consistent environment.

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The February issue of WindowsITPro has an interesting article about Group Policy annoyances (subscribers only). I think the most common problem is Group Policy settings not taking effect immediately. You change a setting and reboot the machine, but the change doesn’t seem to show immediately.

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If you are working with roaming user profiles (server based user profiles) in your organisation, then be prepared for big changes. Windows Vista and Windows XP user profiles are not compatible! However, you can use folder redirection to make XP and Vista roaming user profiles interoperable. Even if you are only working with local user profiles, I recommend reading on.

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Do you know the User Profile Hive Cleanup Service? It can help solve your problems with roaming user profiles, and if your Windows shuts down very slow. Sometimes, applications maintain connections to registry keys in the user profile after a user logs off. The User Profile Hive Cleanup Service monitors if logged-off users have registry hives still loaded and releases them if necessary.

When we recently rolled out about 250 computers, three users had problems with their roaming profiles. Those users didn’t find the last version of their profile on their new computer because their profile was not updated anymore on the server. Every year or so, I encounter the same problem with my own profile. Usually I don’t realize that the synchronization failed because I got no error messages. We only backup user data from the file server. That’s why this is really annoying since I only realize weeks after, that my data was not backed up anymore.

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