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Moving user profile with GPO from local path onto folder redirected user document path

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  • 1 has this problem
  • 17 views
  • Last reply by Mike Kaply

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Hey all the experts

Backgroup: - I'm from a mid size corp environment with majority of users login on roaming profile (AD) - All the profile (browser saved passwords and bookmarks) are stored inside the local %APPDATA%, we want to remove the roaming profile from AD to free up resources and improve user login onto the PCs - User's Documents and Desktop folders are redirected onto the server

What I want to achieve: Setup GPO, to move existing Firefox profile (from %APPDATA%) onto the server storage, like each user's own Documents folder but hidden, so user won't accidentally delete it, then set Firefox to look at that new path permantly

Issues: - Once we removed the roaming profile on AD, when user logs in on another PC, all their bookmarks and saved passwords no longer sync across automatically - There are more than 1000 of PCs and users that we need this changed, which we can't manually copying and pasting the Firefox directory - We have multiple replicated VMs to store the user data i.e. Desktop and Documents

So, I have been looking on the net, but I have only found bits and pieces, like manually moving the Firefox profile from %APPDATA% to the new device's local path, GPO to adjust Firefox config but not copying the profile, no variable syntax I can find to point the new path onto the server directory like how Google Chrome can do it, i.e. ${documents}

Therefore, I would like to ask all your experts here if you can provide me with a step by step guide on how I could do it, as I'm quite new to GPO. As I have worked in an investment bank previously that they managed to get this setup on all browsers.

Hope to hear your good news, if this has been done, please give me a link to it, so I can look it up myself.

Really appreciated.

Hey all the experts Backgroup: - I'm from a mid size corp environment with majority of users login on roaming profile (AD) - All the profile (browser saved passwords and bookmarks) are stored inside the local %APPDATA%, we want to remove the roaming profile from AD to free up resources and improve user login onto the PCs - User's Documents and Desktop folders are redirected onto the server What I want to achieve: Setup GPO, to move existing Firefox profile (from %APPDATA%) onto the server storage, like each user's own Documents folder but hidden, so user won't accidentally delete it, then set Firefox to look at that new path permantly Issues: - Once we removed the roaming profile on AD, when user logs in on another PC, all their bookmarks and saved passwords no longer sync across automatically - There are more than 1000 of PCs and users that we need this changed, which we can't manually copying and pasting the Firefox directory - We have multiple replicated VMs to store the user data i.e. Desktop and Documents So, I have been looking on the net, but I have only found bits and pieces, like manually moving the Firefox profile from %APPDATA% to the new device's local path, GPO to adjust Firefox config but not copying the profile, no variable syntax I can find to point the new path onto the server directory like how Google Chrome can do it, i.e. ${documents} Therefore, I would like to ask all your experts here if you can provide me with a step by step guide on how I could do it, as I'm quite new to GPO. As I have worked in an investment bank previously that they managed to get this setup on all browsers. Hope to hear your good news, if this has been done, please give me a link to it, so I can look it up myself. Really appreciated.

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I think this question would probably be better asked on our enterprise mailing list:

https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/enterprise?pli=1

This is a better place for communicating with other folks that are deploying Firefox.

That being said, we don't have an easy way to globally change where the profile directory is read. You can pass a parameter to Firefox when it is started to read the profile from a different location

-profile "profile_path"

Start with the profile with the given path. Firefox, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey2.x only.

"profile_path" can either be an absolute path ("/path/to/profile") or a relative path ("path/to/profile").