I'm building a basic MSI installation. I want to account for users that have moved their My Documnets folder to a non default Windows location such as a network server. In these cases I want to force the installation to always use the My Documents folder on the local machine. Since the default has been moved it will probably have to create a new one and use it. I've found that many laptop owners use their computers for both work and home. They want to store their work documents on the office serevr but keep their personal documents on their local machine. Can two My Documents folders exist like this?
dhofferber wrote: I'm building a basic MSI installation. I want to account for users that have moved their My Documnets folder to a non default Windows location such as a network server. In these cases I want to force the installation to always use the My Documents folder on the local machine. Since the default has been moved it will probably have to create a new one and use it. I've found that many laptop owners use their computers for both work and home. They want to store their work documents on the office serevr but keep their personal documents on their local machine. Can two My Documents folders exist like this?
Thanks in advance.
You shouldn't try to fix such behaviour in an MSI. The laptops should be configured using GPO's to use Offline folders. This way you get a synched copy of My Documents locally on the laptop.
Thanks for the reply. Your approach would work but the result would be mirrored copies of My Documents on both the laptop and the server. I'd like to set it up so that only work documents are stored on the server and personal documents on the local machine.
If an installation wants to place data in a users personal folder the MSI gets the path to the users My Documents directory and uses it for the installation. If the user has moved their My Documents to another location such as a server, the path used is that one. I want to force the installation to use the local users My Documents path. I'm thinking I could detect the OS and then create a My Documents directory if one does not already exist in the Windows default location. Then install to that directory. Thoughts?
Does anyone know where the path to the users My Documents directory is stored. Possibly a current user registry location?
