MS-press answer makes no sense!

Hello all, great forum. I've been lurking here the last few days as a motivation when I get frustrated / bored reading my book. I figure it's better to procrastinate in a manner that is still somewhat relevant to my goal of achieving an MCSE. Anyways, here's one of those frustrations I mentioned. I'm reading the MS press 70-290 second edition book, and page 3-69 doesn't make sense. It's the answer key for chapter 3 review exercises. It says the answer to case scenario 3 is b, but the only answer that makes sense to me is e.

Case Scenario Exercise, Requirement 3
1. What type of profile will be most useful to maintain a locked-down desktop common to all sales representatives?

A. Local profile
B. Local mandatory profile
C. The All Users profile
D. Preconfigured roaming group profile
E. Preconfigured roaming mandatory group profile.

A local mandatory profile is nice and all, but for a whole department, really? That seems to fall short of the "common to all sales representatives" requirement. Also, from pure practicality, a preconfigured roaming mandatory is finished in way fewer steps and has less continuing maintenance overhead. Is the answer key a typo? If anyone has thoughts on the matter I am interested in hearing them.

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mikedisd2

It's been a while since I've done 290, but I read this as testing your knowledge on roaming vs local profiles. MS wants you to know that roaming profiles are for 1x person/group to access the same profile on many different workstations. As this is on a single desktop, I know that it won't be a roaming profile and has to be something local.
All sales reps just means more than one person.

Remember it's a contrived question, look for the Microsoft answer.

category_five

phoeneous wrote: »

I've never heard of a "Preconfigured roaming mandatory group profile". How do you configure that? Or is that an alternate way of saying the Default User profile ntuser.man file?

Yes, you copy an entire profile to a network share and rename the profile's ntuser.dat to ntuser.man. In AD you specify the share as the users home folder IIRC. Any changes a user makes to their profile are lost upon reboot and multiple users can share this same profile.

category_five

phoeneous wrote: »

Yeah I know that, thats just creating a roaming mandatory file. But I've never heard of it being called a "Preconfigured roaming mandatory group profile".

Oh, the exercises in chapter three were on first configuring a profile before pushing it out as a mandatory profile for multiple users. I assume the act of configuring it first makes it "preconfigured" and the act of setting multiple users to use the same profile from the same network share makes it "group".

mikedisd2 wrote: »

It's been a while since I've done 290, but I read this as testing your knowledge on roaming vs local profiles. MS wants you to know that roaming profiles are for 1x person/group to access the same profile on many different workstations. As this is on a single desktop, I know that it won't be a roaming profile and has to be something local.
All sales reps just means more than one person.

Remember it's a contrived question, look for the Microsoft answer.

Thanks for the response. I think I understand now; work backwards from the book's answer, change "all sales representatives" to "a couple guys sharing the same computer" and presto, the book answer is correct. Thank you for the clarification.

MentholMoose

phoeneous wrote: »

Yeah I know that, thats just creating a roaming mandatory file. But I've never heard of it being called a "Preconfigured roaming mandatory group profile".

Yeah that's why that answer is wrong, there's no such thing as a group profile. The question is trying to trick you into thinking you can assign a "group profile" to a group of users.

From Using User Profiles in Windows Server 2003: Terminal Services Client (Remote Desktop):

Roaming user profiles allow users to move between different computers and maintain the same environment and preference settings. A roaming mandatory user profile is a preconfigured user profile that you assign to users. Because users cannot change a roaming mandatory profile, using this type of profile ensures that these user profiles remain at a manageable size. Additionally, you can assign one mandatory profile to all users who require identical desktop configurations. This allows you to change the desktop environments for all those users by changing only one profile.

qnet

Thanks to the original poster and those who answered, I was wondering about that question also.

category_five

MentholMoose wrote: »

Yeah that's why that answer is wrong, there's no such thing as a group profile. The question is trying to trick you into thinking you can assign a "group profile" to a group of users.

From Using User Profiles in Windows Server 2003: Terminal Services Client (Remote Desktop):

I don't know, the authors of Microsoft Press Managing and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Environment (exam 70-290) think there is;
Page 3-41, Exercise 5 details exactly how to, "Set Up a Preconfigured, Mandatory Group Profile" in 24 steps.

MentholMoose

category_five wrote: »

I don't know, the authors of Microsoft Press Managing and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Environment (exam 70-290) think there is;
Page 3-41, Exercise 5 details exactly how to, "Set Up a Preconfigured, Mandatory Group Profile" in 24 steps.

I guess it's a typo, though it doesn't seem to be in the errata:
MCSA/MCSE Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-290): Managing and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Environment, Second Edition comments and corrections

Also now that I think about it, I'm not even sure answer b is correct. I've only ever used a mandatory user profile with it stored on a network share, which I think is required and wouldn't make it "local", as per this Technet article:
How to assign a mandatory user profile in Windows XP