USMT and Outlook Settings Restored

[Guest]

Hi there,

Has anyone run into any problems with restoring Outlook 2003 settings with
USMT 2.6? Specifically additional mailboxes not being restored, signatures
not being turned back on and PST files not being remapped.

The signature and PST files are copied to the target machine but they are
never mapped. I am not certain if this is an problem or a default feature.

Any help would be great!

Thanks,
Chris

 

[Hunter1]

We're having similar problems but for different reasons using a
different product.

We're using Altiris PC Transplant, and due to the fact we have Outlook
configured to automatically generate a profile for the user on first run
it seems to be over-riding the transplanted personality, something we
noticed on Friday (we're at the fine-tuning stage of profile migration).
View settings and so on seem to be coming across, but not other people's
mailboxes or open archive settings.

As it turns out the information goes into:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\Current Version\Windows Messaging
Subsystem\Profiles.

(this is with Outlook XP, but don't see that it's likely to be much
different with Outlook 2003)

On the first run of Outlook our setup creates a profile of %username%
and makes it default, so the user doesn't get their old profile back
unless they manually change the default Outlook profile. Monday I spose
our next task will be to work out how to fix this prob, most likely
having a script run after profile migration to disable the automatic
outlook profile generation for all existing profiles so that it only
hits those logging in with fresh profiles.

Most of this probly doesn't help you much, but maybe the registry
location might point you in the right direction, we had looked at USMT
briefly but decided to use the tool that came with Altiris after we
ironed out a few other problems with it.

 

[Guest]

This was very helpful! It definitely lead me in the right direction to
getting this resolved. What I found out was through my Office installation I
was creating a custom*.prf file that Outlook was using to create a default
user profile as in your case. I customized the *.prf file even further so
that it wouldn't overwrite the profile that USMT was importing in as well as
not allowing a backup to be created.

I made the setting changes under Section 1 - Profile Defaults of the prf
file, with the following changes:

OverwriteProfile=No
BackupProfile=False

Hope this helps you! Thanks for all your help!
Chris

 

[Hunter1]

Ahhhhh, thank you. It looked yesterday like what I was going to try was
easier said than done. After a wasted hour or so playing with regmon and
filemon I was unable to find anything that seemed to be a "flag" into
the user's profile to say whether the first run had happened or not, so
it was starting to look painful.

I'll take a look at your suggestions today and will let you know how it
went in our environment, our profile isn't so much being overwritten,
more a case of a second one is being created and being set as the
default, but from what you've said I should be able to find a way around
that also via playing with the .prf it's using to generate the new profile.

Cheers
Hunter

 

[Hunter1]

Looks like a line of DefaultProfile=Yes changed to No should fix our
problems, that way the generated outlook profile will only be made
default if there are no other outlook profiles within that user profile.
Not tested but I expect it'll work, thanks for the pointer to that line
of thought as opposed to my previous line of thought!