Some time ago, I said I wanted to do some posts about mobile technology and the problems that come along with it. Mobile technology is huge right now, and will continue to get bigger as people give up their desktops in favor of notebooks, and increasingly, smart phones. The problem is that businesses still need traditional computer networks, and for people who operate them, mobile technology presents such a shift in assumptions that no one has really figured out how to make it all work together. A lot of work, and therefore money, goes into tying those traditional computer systems together, but mobile computing has a way of undoing all of that effort as soon as you unplug. Mobility will continue to grow in popularity, and we’ve got to find ways to bring the benefits of integrated computing to the mobile world, or risk falling back a few steps and losing some of the capabilities that we enjoyed in the past.

I’ve built lots of these networks, and many types of problems arise in them, even without mobility. But when mobile devices become part of the business requirements, the problems can become show-stoppers. After swearing my share of oaths and vendettas, I’ve come to pin the blame on a feature that appears in every major operating system today: the profile. Your profile is the part of your computer account that stores all of your personal application settings and files. Your desktop background is stored in your profile, for example. The profile also stores your email account settings, your web browser bookmarks, your option preferences for office software, and many other things.

The profile has become so intimately connected to our concept of a user account, that they have come to effectively mean the same thing. Most systems provide only one profile per user, and most applications assume that their settings will be in one particular place in the user’s one-and-only profile. But what if you want to access your files and settings from several different places? In a wired network, we have a few different options to allow this, but it boils down to all the computers sharing some networked store of user accounts and profiles, usually centrally managed by the owners of the network. Each computer can access your profile, so you can use your files and applications from any computer in the system. But mobile users also have mobile computers. Their devices commonly go places where the central network is unavailable, and their users still need to access their data from outside the LAN. They may need to continue working, even when there is no internet access at all. The result is usually some hair-brained scheme where you try to figure out what files you’ll need ahead of time, and remember to take separate copies on your mobile device when you leave. Some people forgo the office desktop altogether, and only use their laptops, while some shuttle their files back and forth with flash drives wherever they go.

I know, some of you are thinking “roaming profiles”. Let me explain, for those fortunate enough to have never worked with them. Microsoft created roaming profiles to address this exact problem. They work by keeping the profile on a central server, and whenever you log onto a Windows computer on your network, your profile is automatically copied to it as part of the logon process. When you log out, the files that you’ve changed are “synced” back to the server’s master copy. That way, you’ve always got a full copy of your profile that you can use if the computer ever leaves the network and can’t reach the server. Unfortunately, the point of this aside is that roaming profiles suck – they’re the most hair-brained scheme of all because they offer the worst possible trade-offs. The sync process is automatic and mandatory, with only the most ham-fisted ways to pick and choose what to sync and what not to sync. Windows profiles tend to get large- large enough that this scheme is not feasible with a VPN over the open internet (we’ll get into that in a later post). Roaming profiles are all-or-nothing, and there’s no way to pick and choose different parts of the profile based on which computer you’re on. Got a 12 GB music collection that you only want in the office? Congratulations, that’s why it takes ten minutes to log in every morning. Also, what happens if you log into two or more computers at the same time? When you log out, they’ll each overwrite the others’ changes, and possibly corrupt the central profile, causing your next login to fail. Profiles can even get corrupted for no apparent reason at all; in roaming profile environments, “delete your profile” is as common a cure-all as “reboot the computer”.

So, if roaming profiles are out, what options do we have left? I’ll be covering some of them in my next post. What’s your take? How do tke your work with you when you go mobile?

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