Supporting Users Who Travel Between Computers

Taking Your Office with You

Traveling users (sometimes referred to as roaming users) move between different computers on a network. By using Microsoft Office 2000, traveling users can move between computers without changing the way that they work. Their application settings and working files travel with them, along with any system preferences.

Traveling users are possible because of roaming user profiles. Microsoft Windows 95/98, Windows NT Workstation version 4.0, and Windows 2000 Professional support roaming user profiles, as do Windows NT Server 4.0, Windows 2000 Server, and third-party servers. Office 2000 takes advantage of the operating systems’ features to make Office settings travel with your users.

When you turn on roaming user profiles, you can keep employees working no matter where they happen to be. Users can switch between computers in a lab, in different buildings, or in different offices around the world, as long as they log on to the same network and retrieve their user information from that network. This flexibility helps you make the most of your computer resources.

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Traveling between international offices

When your users travel to offices in other regions, you can make sure that their Office 2000 environments travel with them.

For example, if your U.S. – based customer representative handles accounts in different countries, she can customize Office 2000 to include a custom dictionary that contains the names of the people and companies she corresponds with often.

When your customer representative travels overseas to meet with customers, she can log on to the network from any foreign office and download her user profile. The profile allows her to work as if she were at her home computer. If she sends a memo to one of her customers and checks the spelling, her customized version of Office 2000 automatically skips any names already in her custom dictionary.

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Traveling within a regional site

If your company has several offices in one region, you can take advantage of roaming user profiles to make these offices work like one office.

For example, you might have a manager who is currently working on a memo detailing budget requests for the next year, which includes hidden text to remind him of important points that need to be made face to face. He customizes his toolbar to include the Show All button for easy access to his hidden text.

He is called to a meeting with the Finance group to go over the information he’s just been working on. He logs off of his computer, thus updating his user profile; and then during the meeting, he logs on to a computer in the conference room and retrieves his memo, and then he uses his customized toolbar to display hidden text. He’s able to review his arguments as the meeting goes along and make his arguments to the Finance group.

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Sharing computers among multiple users

If your company doesn’t fit the typical “one user to one computer” scenario, you can use roaming user profiles to make sure that your users always have access to their information on whatever computer they are using that day.

For example, several users might take advantage of computers in your lab on an as-needed basis. One user logs on to work on a report in Microsoft Word. He saves his report as a template so that he can use it again to create his next report. When he logs off, his user profile is updated with the change.

Later that same day, another user logs on to the same computer and opens Word to create a memo. She uses the New command (File menu) and selects from the standard list of available templates. The template that her co-worker created does not appear in her list. She goes on to perform her work as usual.