Prepare a District Windows Laptop For Use Offsite

This article covers the essentials for getting a District Windows PC ready to use outside the District's network.

Not a Grab-and-Go Operation!

The most important thing to keep in mind is that, unlike a District Chromebook or iPad device, you cannot take a freshly-imaged, arbitrary District Windows PC (usually a laptop) outside the District network and expect it to "just work" - you need to prepare it for offsite use by you, specifically. Our Windows PCs make personalized connections to the District's internal network that Chromebooks and iPads do not, and one of those connections is to your "network profile" - which is all of "your files" that live on your Windows Desktop, and in your "My Documents" folder.

Preparation is usually very simple and often completely transparent to most users, but one thing is critical: you need to prepare your PC for offsite use while on the District's network. The whole point of preparing is to bring down onto the laptop, two key things that initially reside on the network and not locally on the laptop. Those two things are:

A login profile for your individual E-number account. This happens the first time you successfully log into and out of Windows on a PC. With a local login profile to lean on, the machine now knows who you are.
Your data files, which live on your Windows Desktop and in your Documents folder. These files are initially brought down onto the laptop when Windows Offline Files, via the Sync Center, synchronizes the data files in your network profile with local copies of the same files in the same places on the laptop itself. (After the initial synchronization, the Offline Files / Sync Center engine re-synchronizes your files--not the whole set, just the things that have changed since the last sync--every time you bring your laptop back into the District network.)

With these two things now locally on the laptop itself, you can work not just offsite, but without being on any network at all. And, once the basic relationship is established, both the login profile and the synchronization of your Offline Files is usually completely transparent.

Microsoft Stream Video

There is a 15-minute video clip out on Microsoft Stream that covers this topic. It is part of the collection of Helpdesk videos on Stream.

The Basics

The above video covers the below steps in greater detail, but in summary, to prepare a PC for offsite use, you should:

Make sure your computer is appropriate for Offline Files use. If the size of the onboard C:\ drive is less than 125GB (and north of 150GB is better) you may want to select a different machine.
Make sure your computer is enabled for Offline Files use. Most laptops in circulation are, but you can confirm this in Sync Center if you want to be sure.
Consider re-imaging the machine. This isn't necessary in all cases, but if you have just come into the machine, and especially if it has come from another staff member, re-imaging will clear off other users' Offline Files from the cache and make that space available to you.
Log in to the machine for the first time, give it 5-10 minutes, and then affirmatively log out (restarting is fine). This establishes the login profile locally on the computer.
- NOTE: During this first login session, while you're waiting that 5-10 minutes, it would be a good idea to log in to the Chrome browser, so that you get all the bookmarks, passwords, etc., that you've saved back to your District Google Apps account. (You could always log into the Chrome browser at any time later, too, but doing it right away is a good idea.)
Configure Offline Files while on the District network. Log in a second time, again give it 5-10 minutes to allow the machine to recognize, under your new login profile, the right sync partnerships and set them up. After the 5-10 minutes, logout/restart again, and then log in a third time. By this third login, the profile is available, the sync partnerships should be established, and the Sync Center should kick off automatically (you can also start it manually, if you like) your first, initial sync. Now, you need to leave the machine on, logged in, and syncing, within the District's network, for long enough so that all the files in your network profile can have time to sync successfully. How long this will take can of course vary, depending on how big your network profile is, and how fast the network is where you are located (e.g., some schools are faster than others), but in most cases it shouldn't take more than three hours, and it can be less. You can confirm in Sync Center if the initial sync has completed.
Test before you trust. Once you have logged in and out successfully, and established a successful sync partnership, and successfully completed an initial synchronization, you can and should test to see that it all works before going offsite and leaning on it. You can do this as follows:
- Restart the laptop so that it comes up "cold".
- Before logging in, put the laptop into Airplane Mode, and disconnect any network cables or docks. This should turn off the wireless radio, and effectively put you into an offline state.
- Log in while in Airplane mode. The login should complete successfully, and you should see your expected Desktop, and files in your Documents folder. This is success.

Common Gotchas

Not preparing the laptop before going offsite. Please don't:
- Grab your laptop that has been freshly re-imaged, and run out the door expecting to go offsite and start working. Without a successful previous login to lean on, the machine has no idea who you are!
- Grab a different laptop into which you have not logged in before (e.g., from a cart), and similarly go offsite. The machine may work perfectly for someone else, but won't know who you are.
Running out of disk space. There can be several causes for this, including the following:
- The PC's hard disk drive is too small. One of the differences between what we call "student-grade" laptops and "teacher-grade" laptops is the size of the hard disk installed in the computer. Laptops intended for teachers have larger disk drives, and one reason for this is to support Offline Files. If your computer's hard disk drive is below 150GB, you may need to be careful about the size of your network profile, to avoid going over the size quota allotted to Offline Files, or even the overall size of the entire disk drive.
- Your network profile is too big. Sometimes the size of your network profile (the combined size of all the files in your Desktop and Documents folders) is so big that you run into the limit of the size that Sync Center can use to synchronize files on that machine, or even into the overall disk space on the machine. Of course disk sizes and Offline Files quotas vary, but in general, if your overall network profile size is above 20GB, you should probably start planning to reduce it by offloading some content to appropriate other places (e.g., a shared network drive, or in cloud storage like OneDrive or Google Drive, etc.).
- Multiple users may be using--sharing--the Offline Files space. If you got your laptop from another staff member, there may already be an Offline Files relationship set up for that other user, and that will impede both on overall disk drive space, and also on the size limit that Sync Center imposes on Offline Files itself. In this case, the right answer is to re-image the machine and re-prepare it just for you.
Being off the network for a long time. We've used Offline Files for a number of years now, and with a small number of people working offsite, who themselves regularly returned to the District's internal network between offsite trips, we didn't have many problems with it. This is how Offline Files is intended to work. But with more users who may work offsite for extended periods of time without coming back to the District's network for regular synchronization, we run into this problem: when working offsite, your network profile files are not being backed up on the network. They only get backed up when Offline Files synchronizes your locally-made (offsite) edits, back onto the network. You should be aware of this behavior, and if you do or expect to do lots of offsite work, you might want to consider storing your critical files not on your Windows Desktop or in your Documents folder, but rather in cloud storage such as the OneDrive space of your District Office 365 account, or the Google Drive space of your District Google Apps account.

Further questions?

If you have further questions, you can always contact the Helpdesk.