next »

[mverdonk]

Hi,

We are trying to achieve the following.
We use Instant Mail to provide users with their own mailbox and (depending on group membership) additional mailboxes.
We want to override this every single time they login, so "create once" is not checked.
Now we want users to be able to preserve signature settings.
The signature itself is preserved, however the setting that it is used for new mails and replies is not.
Strangly enough, when we monitor this behaviour, we see that at logon the user has the right settings in the registry. However, when starting Outlook, these registry-keys (HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows Messaging Subsystem\Profiles\<Profile>\9375CFF0413111d3B88A00104B2A6676\00000001\New Signature & Reply-Forward Signature)
are removed and the user has no default signature set.

We do have the registry-values "backed up" using User Preferences.
But somehow it doesn't work.

Can anybody tell us, is this is possible and how to achieve it?

With kind regards,

Marcel Verdonk
Stichting ORO

[RESguru]

Hi Marcel,
I believe the reason why your signature settings are being overwritten is because the create-once is not checked. Assuming you are using PowerFuse 2008, the User Preferences will unfortunatly not help much as they are loaded up at login, but the Instant Mail profile will be processed afterwards when you start up Outlook, so whatever may have been preserved, will be overwritten when Outlook starts.

Afaik, the entire MAPI profile will be blown away when you don't create-once. This will for example also nuke reference to any PST files the user may have manually opened in his previous sesison.

I wish I could give you a better answer, but let's see if some of the other nice folks have some experience to share

[mverdonk]

Hi Max,

Thanks for your reply. It's very clear.
The problem for us is that we might want to achieve something that's simply not possible.
I'll try to explain the situation in short.

We provide users with their own personal mailbox and, depending on the department they work, a groupmailbox for this department.
Also, we do not have a policy for the company about the format of the signature.
And, users are free to create an own PST-file for archiving messages in their homefolder.
Now, this is very easy to set up with Instant MAPI, with create-once checked and using the additional mailbox-functionality.

It is starting to get tricky when a user moves from one department to another.
This happens very often in our organisation. As we would like to have as few Instant-MAPI profiles as possible, we have only one profile set-up, connecting groupmailboxes depending on the group membership of the user.
So, when a user moves to another department, the group-membership of that user changes. However, because of the create-once setting of the Instant-MAPI this 'new' additional mailbox is not connected automatically.
Users in our organization are not pc-minded enough to connect this mailbox themselves. Besides, isn't that one of the main purposes of PowerFuse?
This is putting quite some extra work for our helpdesk, connecting these mailboxes manually. This can only be done when the user is logged in the Citrix Environment, by shadowing the session.

Perhaps we do this completely wrong. So if anybody has any ideas how to solve this, please let us know.

With kind regards,

Marcel Verdonk
Stichting ORO

[RESguru]

Hmm, I had an idea (not entirely thought through, mind you

When a user moves department, you could delete the *mapi.once files located in the user's homedrive:\pwrmenu folder. This would reset the mailbox settings and This could furthermore be automated with an run-once PowerLaunch external task, assigned to those who have moved department.

Just a half baked idea..

Finally, I urge you to keep on the lookout for the Orchestration Package for Wisdom which will launch sometime next year. It will offer you some really nifty ways of planning and executing all the things that need to happen when you move/create/retire a user account.