12 Best Practices for Effective Profile Management

Editorial Team

Profile management makes sure that the User and his personal settings are applied to the User’s virtual desktop and applications. This is done regardless of the location and endpoint device. Profile management is also enabled through a profile optimization service that gives an easy, reliable way for managing the setting in Windows environments. This is done to make sure that a consistent experience by maintaining a single profile that follows the User is done. It auto consolidates and optimizes the user profiles to minimize management and storage requirements and requires minimal administration, support, and infrastructure. This, along with that, provides users with improved logon and logout. 

Any user profile is an essential medium to improve communication and workflow across the organization. The number of users that directly correlate to the revenue in whatever business you are operating. Good management of user-profiles should be organized and discoverable. This promotes sales, attracts new clients, and brings in prospects. The user login and registrations can be controlled using the best practices of user profile management.

User Profile Management lets you have different users access the user profile management system using different privileges. Using any User Profile Management, you can assign several people or users different roles with specific permissions. For example, you can use three users that are one having an admin role, one having a backup operator role, and one having a restore operator role. The access to assign permission based on the role decreases the chances of an unauthorized user having access to the backup domains. 

When you install the user profile management system, the carrot user profile is set up, with the admin group being assigned to it by default. The admin group controls all user profile management system functions working in the given user profile management system. Through User Profile Management, its internal processes have the following managing functions for users and roles. 

  • Add a user
  • Delete a user
  • Change the User’s password
  • Assign a user to a role
  • Delete a user from a role
  • Assign a role to a user
  • Delete a role from a user

Profile management is a feature that is available for several software systems. Through there is a business challenge for profile management. In the virtualized world, where users have access to get their desktops and applications from particularly any location or device, you need to leverage “user profile” technology to make sure users get a constant experience each time.

When the users log on to their virtual desktops or get a launching of virtual applications, they want to have everything just the way they left it. With all of their personal settings, shortcuts, templates, toolbars and desktop wallpapers and favorites. More complex and varied the user access scenarios are, the more challenging it becomes for IT managers to manage these user profiles.

The Most Common Business Challenge Profile Management as under

  • Last writer wins
  • Profile bloat and logon speed

The Best Practices Of Profile Management Include The Following

1. Custom fields

This is one of the main features of user profile management, i.e., an admin has all the power to customize and edit the fields according to the requirements of the website. It allows the users to get registered or fill in the profile easily and that too, without any hassle. The best one is to have No preconfigured fields that allow 100% customization of adding any desired fields to any of the User. There are several ranges of fields you can choose from, i.e., text, text area/editor, select, image, radio, email, checkbox, date, phone, number Google Maps, HTML delimiter, etc.

2. Flexibility

To be able to scale your work, you must not be restricted to a particular format or layout. There be full adjustability as per the workflow of your organization and the requirements.

  • Manage a variety of user data and an unlimited volume of it.
  • Single and multi-page user registrations
  • Customize registration or login layout
  • Easily editable avatar, supporting gravatar and profile picture

3. Security / Privacy Control

You can let your people have secure management of user profile. This can be possible by the following measures.

  • It should be able to support user personalization with spam blocking and invalid registrations
  • Data validation must be available for every field
  • There must be the management of user roles by giving access to the desired user groups
  • Management of permissions should exist just like restricted access to certain user fields.

4. Personal Document Folders

The folders of personal documents may grow large. Hence one of the best practices of user profile management is recommended using the folder redirection feature to redirect the following folders.

· desktop

· Documents

· Downloads

· Favorites

· Links

· Music

· Pictures

· Searches

· Videos

After the folder is redirected, Profile management doesn’t any longer process the folders during logon.

5. Social integration

A User profile should be able to allow you to login or to link your account with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and also with LinkedIn.

  • A provision of a seamless web experience
  • To collect more accurate data just like verified email addresses
  • To give a good solution for registration
  • To minimize site entry restriction
  • And to give a controlled access

This allows the users to be able to have a seamless and smooth experience while using company resources and not also to intrude into the company data.

6. Searching

Profiling that is streamlined, intelligent, and managed must be able to provide significant searching for all the data. It will help you in saving time and also your effort in scaling reliability. User Search is also a great and important feature. A good user profile management lets its users get customized searching with their desired fields and get selected, user groups. It should have the feature to be able to support searched user lists, including all the fields and values.

7. Troubleshooting Best Practice

Always make sure to utilize the Profile Management configuration checker tool (UPMConfigCheck) to identify potential configuration errors and mistakes. At the point when Profile Management doesn’t work, first, approve whether the User Store configured is available.

8. Cookie Handling

Profile Management currently supports erasing stale cookies for different versions of browsers. You can utilize the “Process Internet cookie files on logoff” policy to erase stale cookies to keep away from cookie folder bloat. Likewise, add the accompanying folders to the list of folders that you need to mirror

9. Folder Redirection

Folder redirection is a feature of Microsoft Windows that you can use with Profile Management. Folder redirection plays a key function in conveying a successful profile solution. To utilize folder redirection, guarantee that the relevant users are in the OU that Profile Management oversees. It is suggested that you configure folder redirection utilizing a GPO in Active Directory.

  • AppData (Roaming)Desktop
  • Start menu
  • Documents
  • Pictures
  • Music
  • Videos
  • Favorites
  • Contacts
  • Downloads
  • Links
  • Searches
  • Saved Games

Redirect all applicable folders of the preceding lists. To avoid folders from redirection, include a policy that excludes those folders, for instance, the Saved Games folder, from synchronization or roaming. From that point forward, the Saved Games folder exists just on the clients’ machines. On the off chance that the machines are non-persistent, the folder is deleted on logoff.

10. Incorporate And Avoid Files And Folders

Profile Management lets you indicate files and folders that you would prefer not to synchronize by customizing inclusion and exclusion lists. To be able to avoid profile bloat, avoid cache files for third party applications, for instance, browser cache files situated at Appdata UserData\Default\Cache. For more data, see Include and avoid things.

11. Profile Streaming

Profile Management brings files and folders in a profile from the user store to the local PC when clients access them after they log on. Doing so accelerates the logon cycle and decreases the profile size. For instance, if a file isn’t really utilized, it is never copied to the local profile folder. You can likewise utilize the Always cache policy to force a lower limit on the size of files that are streamed. Any file this size or bigger is cached locally as quickly as time permits after logon. This helps in user profile management and is considered as an important and one of the best practices for it.

12. Active Write Back And Registry

This feature lessens logoff times contrasted with the Profile streaming feature, particularly when there are many changed files. This element synchronizes altered files and folders (however not registry entries) to the user store during the session, yet before logoff.  This is also one of the best practices of user profile management and can prove to help do it the perfect way.

Conclusion

Profile management has been a great way to let your productivity be increased and hence attain user satisfaction. It makes sure that the personal settings, documents, shortcuts, desktop wallpapers, cookies, and the favorites are always following the User across different windows environments on any device. This provides the ability to control and also reduce the profile size, which improves the logon times. Profile management also gives a better administrative burden. It includes that by default, all settings are captured. And reduce the amount of time and effort that is spent in identifying what should be captured in the profile.

It also enables admins only to include the essential files and folders or exclude the unnecessary ones that account for tens and hundreds of megabytes. But the business challenges also come along with profile management. The biggest challenge is that profile bloat creates wide growth in user-profiles and also results in storage and management issues. Typically during logon, windows copy the User’s roaming profile over a network down to the local devices. Logon time is prolonged by the time it is taking to transfer the whole profile over the network. The bigger the profiles are and the more files that store, the slower the logons will be.

Profile management is empowered through a profile optimization service that gives a simple, dependable path for dealing with these settings in Windows conditions to guarantee a reliable experience by keeping up a single profile that follows the User. It auto-consolidates and enhances user profiles to limit management and storage prerequisites and requires administration, support, and framework while providing clients with improved logon and logout. Profile management is a feature accessible for Virtual Apps and other organization systems and helps in maintaining user data and their profiles.

Profile management empowers heads to naturally move existing client settings and pick at a granular level which profiles information to keep or dispose of. It runs as a system service and doesn’t need any extra servers, administrations, or databases or changes to logon scripts. Logs detailed information on all activities being acted in a simple to read and reasonable format, simplifying the investigating and analysis process.

Profile management helps in consequently detecting and storing all changed profile settings in the registry and file system and can be arranged to catch any sort of registry and file system modifications in the profile. It also helps in preventing the accidental overwriting of user-profiles by utilizing built-in logic to figure out which data ought to be kept. It empowers admins just to incorporate specific files and folders or reject unnecessary ones that represent tens or hundreds of megabytes, limiting the measure of data being managed and put away in the profile and diminishing network overhead. As a matter of course, all settings are captured, decreasing the amount of time and effort spent in recognizing what ought to be captured in a profile. Administrators just need to focus on the things to be rejected from a profile, for example, clashing settings, files, or folders that bloat the profile.