Article Written 2-13-2005

Creating Outlook Profiles for Terminal Services Users during logon.

Introduction: The article below describes one way to create Outlook Mail profiles for Terminal Server users at login time. This method worked flawlessly when it was implemented, and is slightly outdated, however, the methodology of autocreating Outlook Profiles for Terminal Server/ices users can still be used with these free utilities from the Microsoft Exchange Resourse Kit.

Important Note: This method below will only work if your Windows Domain Logon Name (ID) and the Outlook Login Name or Alias match. If they do not match, I'm sure you could script a way around that though.

Straight to the Point: Sample Kixtart Script, the sleep was only used in certain situations where a delay was required to allow the Windows profile creation to complete. As you can see it is remarked out of this script because it was not needed.

;***********Outlook Profile Creation ********
;sleep 5
IF EXIST("z:\")=1
IF EXIST("z:\windows\outlook.prf")=0
copy "c:\kixtart\outlook\outlook.prf" "z:\windows\outlook.prf"
endIf

shell "prfpatch.exe"
shell "newprof.exe -p c:\wtsrv\profiles\%username%\windows\outlook.prf -x -z"

;**********End of Outlook Profile Creation*********************

Some Technical Details:

In the above script example, The z:\ (Terminal Server Root Drive) was used, which we all know is equal to %USERPROFILE% path. The script first checks for the Outlook Profile in the designated location and if it does not exist it copies a preconfigured template outlook profile from a central location c:\kixtart\outlook\outlook.prf. (This location could be on the network, but was placed local to the Terminal Server for performance reasons).

Next the prfpatch.exe extracts the %USERNAME% and presents it to the newprof.exe for insertion into the outlook.prf file automatically.

Outlook.prf file example:

[General]
Custom=1
ProfileName=%username%
DefaultProfile=Yes
OverwriteProfile=Yes
DefaultStore=Service2



The NewProf.exe is then executed with the path switch -p and the path to the user outlook.prf file.

Thats it, pretty simple. The above methodology creates a new Outlook profile for each new user that logs into the Terminal server. This means you can delete any Windows profile at anytime and the Outlook profile will be recreated when the user logs back in. Or if you need to make changes to default Outlook.prf file settings and have the changes take effect on all users easily.

Even though the above method is older and most likely outdated, I hope you can glean some useful information from this approach.


Written by Scott Chiara

Additional Resources:

Newprof.exe Command-Line Options
Deploying Office 2000 - Configuring Outlook Profile Settings
Description of the Profile Descriptor File
Creating User Profiles When You Deploy Outlook