I have a client who uses Firefox as their primary browser. We have enabled folder redirection for their Desktop and Documents folders via GPO and I was hoping to do the same with their Firefox bookmarks as all users have a desktop and access to a Windows 2008 R2 RDS session for remote access and a few have laptops.
I understand there's 2 ways to do this:
Enabled Firefox sync. My issue with this is it's all user-driven. They have to sign up for it, manage their password, enable it when using on other machines, etc...
Turn on the Appdata\Roaming folder redirection GPO. However, I've read on several different forums that this can cause issues for various applications, most commonly Adobe Reader, so I'd like to avoid it if possible
Does anyone know of another reliable server-side policy to enable syncing of Firefox bookmarks between multiple machines for users in an AD environment?
Thanks for any insight you may have.
You could sync the AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox directory, if that's an option in GPO.
Otherwise, you could place the Firefox profile folder in a directory that gets synchronized (like Documents), instead of in its default location, and then set up Firefox on each computer (using the Profile Manager) so it looks in that directory for its profile.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Firefox
Related
I wanted to setup a computer with a variety of settings which I basicly have to do over and over and over again everytime a new user joins our company or changes the computer and I wanted to know if there was a possible way to configure those with a script like I already did with an information colletor script (batch file) and which now works perfectly fine thanks to this webside.
So since I know that here are some really awesome IT Guys with way more experience then me I would love to so something automatic as the next step to save loads of time by simply running a script to configure things like setting up the screensaver, InternetOptions, removing Apps/Softwarelinks in the Start Menu or perhaps even adding links to the bookmark list in firefox or chrome so the user can just start to work and I got loads of time for other important things.
For now it would already be a help to setup a script for Windows 7 but I think we will move more and more to windows 10 so would it be possible to write something to use on both systems without any big changes?
... configure things like setting up the screensaver, InternetOptions,
removing Apps/Softwarelinks in the Start Menu or perhaps even adding
links to the bookmark list in firefox or chrome so the user can just
start to work and I got loads of time for other important things.
Everything you ask about can be configured in a centralized fashion via Active Directory Group Policy. Check the Group Policy Survival Guide page to get started designing the policy for your organization and users.
Group Policy can be defined using PowerShell and via Group Policy Management Console which is GUI-based.
Note that the above will only work if you are in Active Directory domain. If you are not, you still can use Local Group Policy, but you will have to run a script on every user's computer. I am not sure whether there are native PowerShell cmdlets to manage Local Group Policy, but AFAIK you can do that via Windows Registry or using special tools.
I have a Mac and 2 Windows 7 machines. I use a local page, which is stored on the hard drive of each system, as the Homepage link.
Since I have the same Google account signed in on all three machines, I am unable to set individual homepage paths (while syncing other settings). On one windows machine I was able force the HomepageLocation attribute through Registry change in the Policy settings (HKLM/Software/Policies/Google/Chrome/HomepageLocation).
But when I tried the same on the other Windows machine, the setting was not listed as an Machine override under chrome://policy
I am not sure what is different on both Windows machines. Please suggest if I am missing something while setting the registry entry, or if there is an easier way to achieve this objective.
Thank you!
I've several devices that are kept in sync with the native Firefox sync but I don't see any options to sync my current state/session (opened tabs/windows) between them.
I use session manager addon to save and restore my session automatically but can't see any option to sync states/sessions across devices.
Do you know a solution?
Yes, this is easily possible through cloud-computing!
For example: I use google drive on my machines.
I've set up Session Manager's session-store-folder on an google drive folder,
and did the same on all of my machines. Once I close the browser, the stored sessions are emediately synced on every machine. Opening Firefox on another Machine has the new stored files available and is able to restore any session on any of my machines.
I hope this helped you out!
Greetings
Mike
Protecting user files with File History talks about File History, which is basically a continuous backup for Windows 8. The blog discusses File History in depth, and also discusses how to integrate SkyDrive.
I want to programmatically disable backup of certain files. The files live on another server, and there's no need to back them up locally or put them on someone else's cloud. The blog and related articles doe not talk about opt'ing out of the service for application data.
How does one programmatically: (1) disable local file backups; and (2) disable cloud based backups. I'm interested in settings for both Windows 8 (desktop or laptop) and Windows Phone 8.
Related: Both Android and Apple have similar. For Android, we add android:allowBackup and set it to false in AndroidManifest.xml. For Apple, we can use kCFURLIsExcludedFromBackupKey file property or com.apple.MobileBackup extended attribute.
Jeff
In Windows Phone 8, backup and restore settings are controlled by the user through system settings. An app cannot prevent itself from being backed up. However, note that the backup does not store any data associated with third party apps but rather only stores a list of installed apps
So basically you don't need to do anything in your app to prevent local files from being stored on SkyDrive if the user has enabled backup.
In Windows 8 everything can be backed up since an admin user will have full access to his computer files, I don't think you can restrict this. If you have sensitive data you can use DataProtectionProvider to protect it.
We are developing a web based application which provides a repository of users case files. Would like the user to be able to access these from their web browser with full read write capability.
For an earlier generation of our system, which was hosted on a local Linux server with Windows clients we were able to share out a folder and access it with \\server\share_name\file.doc type links. If these type of links were included in web pages (in internet explorer) and clicked on the file opened in MS Word and was savable directly into the shared folder. These type of links however only worked in IE - not FF or Chrome
Moving now to an internet based solution in our next generation of the system, we require similar functionality.
We are toying with the idea of having a WebDAV (or FTP/SFTP) share and mapping a local drive on each client machine to it to provide similar functionality. This though will probably not work well with FF or Chrome with \\server\share_name... type links. We have done brief testing and file:// links do not provide write capability once the file is opened.
As a last resort we will be able to use manual file upload dialogs, but this is not ideal and would entail additional end user training.
Has anyone any similar experience in this field and any possible solutions / best practice.
When you map remote resource as a local drive, for a browser this becomes a local drive. And browsers have only limited access to the local file system. Now when you provide a link to the browser, the browser's default behavior is to download the resource behind the link, and then let the local application process it. The browser just doesn't know how to open the remote resource locally in a different manner.
The solution would be to let the browser download something (some kind of link file) and have some local helper module (external application or browser plugin) open this link file and open the location, specified in this link file, locally. As this would be a client-side helper module, it will be able to interact with the client system and will know how to open the provided link. Given that the virtual drive letter can be different on each system (if you mount the disk to the drive letter), the helper module would need to resolve the link to point to the correct local drive. If you create a hidden virtual drive (our virtual storage products let you do this), then a link would look like "\SomeFancyNameUniqueToYourApp\Path\To\File.ext" and no resolving would be necessary. And most applications handle this type of paths fine.
I don't know for sure, but it's possible that browsers will open Windows .lnk files without a need in helper module, and with hidden virtual drive you could generate an LNK file on the server and have the browser open it locally. But this is just a guess. My bet is that you will need a helper module anyway.
ftp://username:password#hostname/ type links should work, and MS apps are getting better at handling them. still not 100% though
Try SMEStorage.com. They enable you to map local WebDav and FTP servers and access files using a Cloud Drive on Linux, Mac or Windows, and also from mobile devices (iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7). You can get unique file links for each file and also secure file sharing in which the links expire.