- IntelliMirror Scenarios
- Replacing a Dead PC
- Coping with the Mobile Laptop User
- Setting Up Environments for New Employees
- Dealing with the Employee Who Knows Just Enough to Be Dangerous
- About This Tutorial
Dealing with the Employee Who Knows Just Enough to Be Dangerous
Sometimes you'll be blessed with a user who thinks that he's helping you when he goes in and cleans up all those "extra" files that he finds in his application and system directories. Although his heart is in the right place, most of us would prefer that he confine his housekeeping efforts to the My Documents folder. He might even go around helping his neighbors clean up their hard drives. Without IntelliMirror, you would soon be receiving calls as these users try to open PowerPoint and find that "some necessary files are missing to open this application." With IntelliMirror, the users attempt to open PowerPoint and it opens just fine, even though their helpful neighbor deleted 17 necessary files from their hard drives.
What happened? You just saw the self-repairing software functionality of IntelliMirror at work. When the user invoked PowerPoint—an application that you had assigned through Group Policies—the Installer service automatically checked to make sure that the application was installed. Seeing that it was installed already, IntelliMirror then checked to make sure that all the correct files were there and that they matched the version specified by your policy. When Installer discovered the missing files, it simply loaded them onto the machine again, and the user was off and running. That's much simpler than getting a call, going out to have a look, trying to figure out what's missing, finally just deciding to reload the whole application, and all while daydreaming about creative new ways to maim your helpful user.