[TomcaT]

My wife wants to access her email on both our two home PCs, they are connected on a peer to peer wireless LAN, with my main PC being the controlling gateway to the internet.

We both use Outlook 2003, my question is how do I make her account "roam", my machine is on all the time so there is no issue with the LAN not being available. What conditions are required for permissions, passwords etc......

I am using WIN XP Pro, sp1a, the network is fine and I can see both machines okay on the network.

Any help/advice appreciated.

Cheers,

TomcaT


(To Mr Moderator, I have Looked on this site and there are no guides etc, if this is in the wrong forum, please move it to the correct one..... )

[Midncom]

I think you're mixing up some things here. Roaming Profiles don't have much to do with MS Office. They are used in Active Directory based environments to make the users' environment "roam" with the user from desktop to desktop.
Outlook mail boxes and profiles work mainly with Exchange Server.

There are other possibilities to transfer "User Profiles" from Outlook, such as export/import the .PST file.

Although I don't have much experience running a peer to peer network, I am pretty sure that there is no possibility to manage Outlook profiles centrally.

[newdles]

There isn't a way that I know of. Even if there was/is, I HIGHLY suggest you NEVER do something like that. This opens up tons of possibile security issues that I wouldn't even want to get into.

If this is an absolute must, why not create another Outlook account on the machine she would like to use as well as hers?

newdles
http://www.webzila.com

[TomcaT]

I also posted this on another thread and got a solution, which was to open the pst file out of a shared folder, which I have done and it works, I also put a password on the pst file, it annoys her abit and has got used to it.

Do you think there is a security issue with this? I have WEP enabled (for what it is worth) and all the accounts are password enabled.

When I was talking about roaming profiles, there is an option in XP Pro that allows you to set up a roaming profile?? although I cannot get it to work as I wanted, where I used to work we had NT4 and I had a roaming account that allowed us to logon anywhere in the company network, I just thought it was the same!! oh well......

Thanks for your help guys.

[Justice]

Tomcat, What you want done CAN be done but it would require a 3rd computer to act as either a NT Domain Controller, or Win2K Server for Active Directory (AD), and it doesn't require exchange. Roaming profiles require a domain controller.

• First, setup the server for your domain.
  
• Create the accounts for you and your wife. Specify a home directory or logon script to run when you logon. (I use a logon script, as it's one file to modify for everyone, instead of having to make changes to each persons account. I.E. a batch file that simply does: net use h: \\servername\sharename)
  
• Join the workstations to the domain.
  
• Logon at least once as you and your wife on the workstations. Logoff.
  
• Logon as the domain administrator and copy your profiles to the mapped h: drive. I would reccomend creating a "documents and settings" folder on the h: drive, and placing the profiles within that. Makes a certain registry change easier as you will see in a moment.
  
• Run regedit. Find the key "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList" and click on it. You will see a few subkeys in this key. Search the subkeys, starting from the bottom and going up, for a string that is named "ProfileImagePath" and has a value begining with "%SystemDrive%\Documents and Settings\"user"". For example, your wife's account is named "wife". The setting would then be "%SystemDrive%\Documents and Settings\wife". Highlight the %SystemDrive% and delete it, and put in H: so it should now look like "H:\Documents and Settings\wife"
  
• [edit]D'oh! Left out important step! After you make the change to the registry, then copy (or move) the individual profile folder out of C:\Documents and Settings\"user" to the H: location. [/edit]
  
• Do this on both workstations and everything should be set.

You can do a search on setting up roaming profiles on google, as I haven't done those in so long I really don't remember how to anymore. Here's a pic of the registry value: http://members.cox.n...s31/regedit.gif

Oh, and not only will her mail be acessible on both machines, so will her favorites, documents, and and any files stored on her desktop.

[likuidkewl]

Ok a much simpler solution to all of this was posted above.
1>Make her a user account on your machine
2>Setup her account, on your pc, to access her email, and leave a copy on the mail server.
3>Have her machine leave a copy to, BUT pull the messages off the server for good about every 5 days.
Easy she has access from both machines and her email stays in one spot for atleast 5 days.

BTW, setup your wireless network to filter out MAC address that is alot safer than WEP.

[Justice]

That way would work for recieving email, but any sent messages would only be on the pc she sent the message from.

[TomcaT]

Thanks for your input guys, I will try them out as I do have another machine that is doing nothing......

Cheers,

TomcaT

[Justice]

Oops.. forgot a step... edited above post.

[TomcaT]

Justice, on Mar 30 2004, 10:20 AM, said:

Oops.. forgot a step... edited above post.

Doh!!!!! Thanks for coming back man......