Supporting Users Who Travel Between Computers

Preparing Office for Traveling Users

Users are able to travel easily between computers when their documents and application preferences travel with them. This requires both configuring the Microsoft Office 2000 installation to make it easier for users to travel and configuring the operating system to support users who travel.

A uniform configuration of operating system and application software throughout your network simplifies the task of supporting traveling users. In addition, it helps to install Office 2000 to the same place on each computer.

The following guidelines can help you make your environment work well for traveling users:

Install Office 2000 to the same folder on each computer   If users travel from a computer that has Office installed on drive C to a computer that has Office installed on drive D, their shortcuts and customized settings might not work correctly.

Install Office on a per-computer, rather than per-user, basis   Traveling users rely on user profiles to transfer their individual settings. However, you can save both hard disk space and download time by installing Office 2000 on a per-computer basis. For Windows NT, log on as an administrator of the computer and then install Office 2000. For Windows 95/98, install Office before you turn on user profiles. Installing on a per-computer basis ensures that the installation information is shared between all users on that computer, so it does not need to be stored separately for each user.

Note   Installing Office 2000 before enabling user profiles on Windows 95/98 gives you a per-computer installation of Office 2000. Be aware, however, that using this method for Windows 95/98 can cause Windows installer shortcuts to display a generic image, rather than the application icon. The shortcuts continue to function correctly; only the image is affected.

Install Office applications to run from the network   If you install the Office applications on the network, these applications are always available to traveling users, as long as your network is running. With the applications on the network, you also cut down on the number of files and other objects that must be copied to each hard disk when users travel to a new computer.

Install crucial Office applications to run from the local hard disk   You can install the Office applications that users need most to run from the local hard disk. For example, if everyone uses Word on a daily basis to work on reports, memos, and other documents, you can ensure that their work is not interrupted by server problems by installing Word on the local hard disk.

Store user information on the network   When you configure a user profile to roam, it is copied to the network, and then downloaded when a user travels to a new computer. To make roaming even easier, you can also store other information, such as your users’ My Documents or Personal folders on a server, so that users can open their documents from the server, no matter which computer they are using.

Tip   If you store user information on a file server, rather than your Primary Domain Controller (PDC), you can also balance the load on your servers more efficiently. For more information about load balancing, see your network documentation.

Create a default Office user profile   Office 2000 includes the Profile Wizard that you can use to save a set of Office options. This set of options is called an Office user profile. You can start all of your users off with the same configuration by creating and deploying a default Office user profile when you deploy Office 2000.

Set system policies   You can protect or enforce important settings through system policies. For example, if you want all users to save files in a particular format, you can set the file type to use through a system policy.

Tip   Do not lock down the system entirely if you are supporting traveling users. Make sure that user profiles and system policies allow users to install the applications they need when they travel to a new computer. You can also set the Always install with elevated privileges policy for the Windows installer. This policy allows any user to install Office 2000 features as if the user were an administrator for that computer.

Top

See also

You can use the Profile Wizard to create an Office profile and give your traveling users a standard environment to start from. For more information about using the Profile Wizard, see Profile Wizard.

You can set system policies to control which options are available to your traveling users. For more information about system policies and Office options, see Managing Users’ Options with System Policies.

Traveling users rely on roaming user profiles to track their user information. For more information about roaming user profiles in Windows NT 4.0, see the "Guide to Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Profiles and Policies." To find the guide, search for Windows NT 4.0 Profiles on the Microsoft Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/.