Google

Google Adwords Editor 9.7.1 and 9.8.1 and 9.9.0 again has been released with major design flaws, see Developers best practice for Windows user profiles. It saves itself, including Adwords data in Windows folder structures that are getting lost on a user logout. Additional to this, there is no way to redirect the data folder to a Roaming Profile folder like it's possible with Google Chrome.

The fundamental broken Windows basics are:

• Roaming Profiles are not supported
  • As result - all data and the application itself get's lost if you log off from the computer.
  • This happens for the reason that the Application is installed to LocalAppDataFolder, what is a folder that is per definition a folder that is excluded from roaming.
• Application is not installed for All Users
  • This is at least wrong design as Adwords should be used by 98% in Enterprises and not at home. The application need to be deployable per machine to be Enterprise ready.

How to workaround some of the issues?

With version 15 Google seems to have published the very first version of Google Chrome for Business that at least starts up/opens in an Enterprise environment with Roaming Profiles and redirected AppData folders. Yes - You have read correctly - they are at version 15 and this is the first version that may work. They claimed in december 2010 with Version 11 that Chrome is Ready for Business. The only thing that was ready - was a very limiting MSI wrapper that is not a full-fledged MSI setup. These version 11 was not ready for Business and the only important functionality was the installation to %ProgramFiles% folder, but this does not make Chrome ready for Business. It's still only a suxxx MSI wrapper around the normal installer and as one example - it does not allow you to customize the icon folders.

Sometimes you may need to develop custom tracking code for Google Analytics. If you sit in front of your development machine and the development or testing site you are using is localhost you will run into the problem that you don't see a tracking event firing to Google.

So you may ask you how to test the code without going into production? There are several options...