Using Google Chrome Roaming Profile settings with UE-V

In my work to get Google Chrome being a good citizen in an enterprise environment it is not time to look at roaming the Chrome settings. Chrome has support for roaming profile data and it can be enabled using a Group Policy which is great. Is it perfect, no it doesn’t roam Extensions for example. Is that a problem in an enterprise, perhaps I will cover that in a later post.

Note: that this settings disable cloud sync of Chrome settings for the end-users.

The file is stored per default in C:\Users\%UserName%\AppData\Roaming\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default and it is called Profile.pb which in my scenario is fine then I can roam it using UE-V in Windows 10. You can move the file it creates using another Group Policy setting: “Set the roaming profile directory” so we can choose to save it somewhere else that is synced by another solution perhaps.

The .xml template used for UE-V is really simple, it only includes the profile.pb file.



<?xml version=”1.0″?>
<SettingsLocationTemplate xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/UserExperienceVirtualization/2013A/SettingsLocationTemplate”>
<Name>Google Chrome</Name>
<ID>Google-Chrome-profile</ID>
<Version>1</Version>
<Author>
<Name>Jorgen</Name>
<Email>jorgen@ccmexec.com</Email>
</Author>
<Processes>
<Process>
<Filename>chrome.exe</Filename>
</Process>
</Processes>
<Settings>
<File>
<Root>
<EnvironmentVariable>APPDATA</EnvironmentVariable>
</Root>
<Path>Google\Chrome\User Data\Default</Path>
<FileMask>profile.pb</FileMask>
</File>
</Settings>
</SettingsLocationTemplate>

The file can be downloaded here:
chrome

We then register the new template either using PowerShell or an UE-V Template share.
And the result is an amazing end user experience!