The Windows 2000 Feature That Became an IT Nightmare

Описание: Windows 2000 introduced Folder Redirection to solve a problem that had plagued network administrators for years: employees saving important documents on their local computers instead of the company server.

On paper, it was a brilliant idea. Redirect the Desktop and My Documents to a central file server, protect the files with regular backups, and let employees carry on working exactly as before.

But in the real world, things weren't always that simple.

In this episode of NT to Now, we start with Windows NT 4.0 and demonstrate just how painfully slow roaming profiles could become, particularly when users filled their desktops with hundreds of megabytes of files.

Then we move to Windows 2000 Server and Professional to explore how Folder Redirection was supposed to solve the problem and the headaches it could create for administrators.

We'll look at exclusive folder permissions that could lock administrators out of their users' files, Offline Files synchronisation, and what happened when employees moved computers between offices connected by slow site-to-site VPNs.

Drawing on my own experiences supporting Windows networks in the late 1990s and early 2000s, we'll explore why I always felt Folder Redirection was a very technical solution to what was fundamentally a human problem.

Was Folder Redirection a clever solution, or did it simply move the problem from employees to IT departments?

Let me know if you supported Folder Redirection back in the day, and what your experiences were.