Mass Home Folder Creation?

[Blind]

Coming from a small business environment and being a complete twit, I never really needed to create more than one home folder at a time. Now I have to make an entire incoming class. Doing this manually by sharing each folder and setting up permission is just silly. (the way of my predecessors)

 

The problem is that I've never been much of a scripting guy (desktop authority is my friend) and I would really like to get some suggestions on an easy way to do this. I'm exceedingly fond of gui based solutions.

 

(If it alters the suggestions, I've already got the empty folders with the student usernames created)

[iatkinson]

We use AD Infinitum to bulk create users from a csv file though from experience it's not 100% reliable, can miss the odd permission here and there.

[Dos_Box]

This will do it..and for free too

 

http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~mikem/activeman/index.html

 

The serial and other info is at the bottom of the page.

[FN-GM]

if you select all the users and then go into properties then home folder type the following \\Server\SharedFolder\%username% it will make a older inside a shared folder and sort out the permissions.

[gnarlyc]

As FN-Greatermanchester says, in the past, we would just select all users and configure the path for that field. You can also take a look at ADmodify -

 

http://www.msexchange.org/articles/ADModify-Change-Exchange-Specific-AD-User-Attributes.html.

 

Dos_Box - Thanks for the link to another cool, free tool! I really like to have as many options as possible. They all seem to do things a little differently, so some are more appropriate for different tasks.

[petectid]

This will do it..and for free too

 

http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~mikem/activeman/index.html

 

The serial and other info is at the bottom of the page.

 

I had a look at this the other day, installed it on a vmware virtual server and bulk imported some users to test the application seemed to work fine. While exiting the software it crashed BSOD, I cannot get the image to boot now. The image I used was a snapshot of clean install of W2k3 Standard SP1. If I manage to recover the image and find out what went wrong I will update this post.

[Blind]

if you select all the users and then go into properties then home folder type the following \\Server\SharedFolder\%username% it will make a older inside a shared folder and sort out the permissions.

 

 

I guess I never really realized that it automatically made the folder. What do you guys set the permissions to on the main shared folder. If it's wide open all you have to do is go to the root to view all the sub folders?

[FN-GM]

on the main folder make it so only admins have access and then each subfolder the user has full rights on there folder only.

[altecsole]

Have a look at:

http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/2b24872a-05ca-41be-9887-33acc87a20561033.mspx?mfr=true

 

and:

http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/0c1ca7f6-5e16-4157-9dd5-9a5b140a04ba1033.mspx?mfr=true

[originofsymmetry]

My problem stems from this one. I use the \\Server\Sharename\%USERNAME% to create the home folders, but is their anyway (quicker than manually copying and pasting) My Music, My Pictures and My Videos, as they only get made when the user first runs Media Player and Movie Maker, and the My Pictures folder isn't even given the proper icon. How could I make these folders be automatically made with appropiate icons aswell?

[tech-man]

I use Account Management Spreadsheet from http://www.wisesoft.co.uk works a treat and is very easy to use.

[Joedetic]

The way i understood it...if you gave someone full rights on a folder....they could delete it?

 

So giving users full rights on their home dir at \\server\share\%USERNAME% would mean they could delete it.

 

I could well be wrong and probably am. Can anyone clear this up for me?