Non of the MVPs can give you an 'Official Word' - we are all volunteers
here, giving you the benefit of what we have found out for ourselves.
You also don't give and details of what versions of Office and/or OS and/or
hardware you are using - these details may help someone give you some
additional pointers.
I read this question before Barry's response and went to see if I
actually could find an official Microsoft stance on using Office with
network home folders but I couldn't find one. (I'm not yet done looking
either.)
From the viewpoint of someone who administers a sizable amount of Macs I
would advise not using network home folders with Office for a few
reasons:
1. Having a network home folder that follows the user from machine to
machine is nice so long as you can restrict logins to one machine at a
time. When a user logs in to multiple machines only one can have access
to his preference files. The others will often error. I've seen this
with Word 2004, Extensis Suitcase X1, QuarkXPress and other common Mac
applications.
The same holds true for Entourage. Only one machine at a time can modify
the Entourage database. The other will error. Entourage was not made to
have multiple machines reading/writing to its database.
2. For "decent" functionality a good 100MB/Full network must be in
place. Anything less will be a poor user experience. But even a fast
network is prone to slowdowns due to network traffic.
3. Whether the user realizes it or not he's often reading from or
writing to his preferences or other files. Reading and writing using a
network home folder will mean delays of a few seconds, which can be
frustrating after a while. Email is a prime example of constant reading
and writing, especially if the Entourage database integrity check (on by
default) is active.
4. Another constant activity is virus scanning. For me, antivirus
software is a must in a corporate environment, it's not an option.
Having multiple machines scanning files as they are saved to their user
home directories would cause a lot of network and server disk activity.
Users by default like to save email attachments to their Desktops. This
makes finding the attachments easy. Combine the traffic of receiving an
email attachment (stored in Entourage's database on the network home
folder), saving to the Desktop (again across the network) and then
antivirus software scanning as the file is saved (scanning across the
network) and you're now getting a lot of network traffic and user
slowdown.
This isn't an all-inclusive list of my problems with network home
folders but it should clearly indicate that I don't recommend using
Entourage with them.
Hope this helps! bill
