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Greetings to everyone here. I'm a network admin in charge of deploying Chrome to my network and setting it as the default browser, though IE will of course still be available for users. I've downloaded and installed the Chrome ADMX templates and for the most part I've gotten things to work as I want, but I'm looking for suggestions on a few things -

  1. Whether or not there's a (good) way to get Chrome to work with Roaming profiles so that users will get their bookmarks/settings/etc when they log onto a different computer. I did notice that there's an option on the policy template to have Chrome store the user profile else where besides the default directory (which is in Appdata/Local), but according to what I've read storing profiles on a network drive is a bad call because profiles aren't backwards compatible.

Meaning that if Chrome updates on one computer, and then the user logs onto another computer that hasn't updated yet, the newer profile may be incompatible with the older version of Chrome and cause Chrome to crash. Not sure if this happens much in practice but I'd hate to to have that happen.

  1. I'm also wondering if there's any good way to sync bookmarks with IE (maybe a batch file or something along those lines?). I did notice that you can have Chrome automatically import bookmarks from IE (via GPO), but that will only happen the first time the user opens Chrome. What I'd like would be to have bookmarks synced, or at least some way for Chrome to periodically import bookmarks from IE (maybe at logoff?). I'd rather users not have to manually transfer favorites back and forth between Chrome and IE.

Any suggestions on either of these would be appreciated.

zoro07
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2 Answers2

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Roaming Chrome: Get the Chrome ADMX files from Google. Then you can use the set user data directory. We have it set to ${roaming_app_data}\Google\Chrome\User Data and that gets their settings into the roaming profile.

Edit: Can't add comments to reply, but we've been running this for years and never had anyone lose their data when chrome updated.

E-Rock
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  • Appreciate the input! I actually already have the ADMX files stored and was thinking about setting it to a roaming folder. My only concern is that I've read that profiles aren't backwards compatible and that running an older version of Chrome with a newer profile can cause crashes. So my concern is that users will have problems if Chrome (along with their profile) updates on their computer and then they log onto another computer with an older version of Chrome that hasn't updated yet. Not sure if this happens much in practice but according to the Chromium website it could. – zoro07 Jan 22 '15 at 00:07
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This fixed it for me. Start Chrome with these parameters:

--user-data-dir=%appdata%\Google\Chrome --disk-cache-dir="%appdata%\Google\Chrome"
dawud
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user221530
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