At the school I am interning at, all students and faculty have a mapped home folder known as the "M:" drive for storing files that they can access from all computers. For faculty who have laptops, we enable offline file sync for the "M:" drive so that they can access a copy of their files from home; however, we do this as a post-imaging task. Sometimes it is missed.
I've been trying to find a way to eliminate the need to manually enable offline file sync after imaging. The only possibility I've found so far is the "Administratively assigned offline file" Group Policy Object (located in User Configuration/Administrative Templates/Network/Offline Files).
If I enabled this, I can see the following situation occuring:
- Teacher A is assigned a computer and her "M" drive is automatically set to sync.
- Teacher B forgets his computer, so Teacher A lends hers to Teacher B.
- Teacher B logs in and his "M" drive, which is multiple gigabytes in size due to stored videos of the sports team he coaches, syncs to the computer.
- Teacher B never logs in again, but a copy of his files remain on Teacher A's computer, wasting space.
As the policy is not in the preferences category, I don't think that I can enable item-level targeting. I've also considered a registry edit, as they can be item-level targeted. However, I could not find a key that would allow me to enable it through the registry. Is there another way that I could make the policy only apply to a user when he is on his main computer? Thanks!
Update: After I passed along the info that there is no "nice" way to achieve this goal, my boss decided we're not going to try to frankenstein something together. However, I thought of one last thing, which might be worth looking into if anyone really wants to make something like this would work: Service control can be item level targeted, so in theory I imagine that it could be set so that the sync service gets killed for a given user if the user is not logged onto his own computer, and enabled when the primary user logs onto his own device. Just a thought!
Best Answer
You're running into a design-limitation of Offline Files. It is a per-machine cache, enabled and disabled at a per-machine level. Offline Files limits visibility of items to users who are authorized to view them, but there is a single cache on the machine. You can't disable the caching functionality for just certain users on a machine.
There just isn't a granular level of control to do what you're looking for. The community asked for it in Windows Vista, again in Windows 7, and still didn't get it in Windows 8. (There's some kinda, sorta functionality in Windows 8 with the "Primary Computer" functionality of Folder Redirection, but that's not a change in Offline Files-- it's just a change in Folder Redirection that impacts the Group Policy setting to always make redirected folders available offline as a side-effect.)