Follow up: User profile and user data changes in Windows 8 vs primary computers

Windows 8 will allow you to set roaming user profiles and/or folder redirection to be applied only if the user login to his or her primary computer. During the Windows 8 roadshow I got a question if there is an opposite action I can take to use roaming profiles on all machines except some machines or one particular machine.

The answer is yes, you can do this. As good as all organizations set the profile path on each user object in Active Directory, but as of Windows Vista and later there is a new group policy setting where you can set the roaming user profile path using GPOs instead.

What this basically means is that you can apply a GPO with a roaming user profile path on certain computers where you want user profiles to be roamed, and keep for instance conference room computers out of this OU to make sure that users do not get their roamed profile on these machines.

The GPO setting is found in Computer configuration\Administrative templates\System\User profile and is called “Set the roaming profile path for all users logging into this computer”. So if you have the profile path set on the user objects you need to remove those and make sure that you have the GPOs linked to the right OUs.