Profile Management

Specify a template or mandatory profile

By default, new Citrix user profiles are created from the default user profile on the computer where a user first logs on. Profile Management can alternatively use a centrally stored template when creating profiles. The template can be a standard roaming, local, or mandatory profile that resides on any network file share.

Any variation in different devices’ default user profiles results in differences in the base profile created for the user. You can regard your selection of a template profile as a Global Default User profile.

As prerequisites:

  • Ensure that the template profile does not contain any user-specific data
  • Ensure that users have read access to the template profile
  • Convert a mandatory profile to a template profile by renaming the file NTUSER.MAN to NTUSER.DAT
  • Remove SACLs from NTUSER.DAT in the template profile

For information on creating template profiles by customizing existing Microsoft profiles, see https://support.microsoft.com/kb/959753and https://support.microsoft.com/kb/973289.

  1. Under Profile Management, open the Profile handling folder.

  2. Double-click the Template profile policy.

  3. Select Enabled.

  4. In Path to the template profile, enter the location of the profile you want to use as a template or mandatory profile. This path is the full path to the folder containing the NTUSER.DAT registry file and any other folders and files required for the template.

    Important: If the path consists only of NTUSER.DAT, ensure that you do not include the file name in the path. For example, with the file \\myservername\myprofiles\template\ntuser.dat, set the location as \\myservername\myprofiles\template.

    Use absolute paths, which can be UNC paths or paths on the local machine. You can use the latter, for example, to specify a template profile permanently on a Citrix Provisioning Services image. Relative paths are not supported.

    This policy does not support the expansion of Active Directory attributes, system environment variables, or the %USERNAME% and %USERDOMAIN% variables.

  5. Optionally, select a check box to override any existing Windows user profiles. If a user has no Citrix user profile, but a local or roaming Windows user profile exists, by default the local profile is used. And this file is migrated to the user store, if this is not disabled. You can change the setting by enabling the check box Template profile overrides local profile or Template profile overrides roaming profile. Also, identify the template as a Citrix mandatory profile. Like Windows mandatory profiles, changes cannot be saved to Citrix mandatory profiles.

If the Template profile setting is not configured here, the value from the .ini file is used. If this setting is not configured here or in the .ini file, no template or mandatory profile is used.

For your changes to take effect, run the gpupdate /force command from the command prompt as documented at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/gpupdate.

Specify a template or mandatory profile

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