Advice on setting up Home Folders

[jmak]

Hi

 

I'm in the middle of implementing individual AD accounts for all of our pupils. There are two main drivers: I've set up RM Unify to provide access to our ever increasing range of web-based services; I want pupils to be able to save to personal folders directly from our Learnpads.

 

Learnpads have full access to Home Drives as they can be linked to AD (which I have working successfully). However, as we haven't had individual logins for pupils before, they don't have any Home Drives. From what I've read, the preferred way to do this is by GPO/GPP and then the Home Drive is created the first time the user logs on. However, I think that many of our users will login to Learnpads before they login to Windows clients, so I can't guarantee that Home Drives will be there for all of the pupils, which makes it a bit difficult to launch with teachers.

 

Is there a simple way to bulk create the folders for all users? (I can probably find my way around customising a script - I presume it would need be a script that I run, rather than a login script, otherwise I would have the same problem as using GPOs - but I don't have the knowledge to write a script from scratch.) If I use such a method now, would that preclude using a GPO in the future?

 

Thanks in advance

[mowgli82]

You could just set the home folder path in in AD under the profiles tab then configure the redirection via GPO - remember to untick "give exclusive rights"

Connect \\unc path to root folder\%Username% - you can highlight all users in the OU and click properties, once you put in the path and click apply it will create a home folder for each user.

[jmak]

You could just set the home folder path in in AD under the profiles tab then configure the redirection via GPO - remember to untick "give exclusive rights"

Connect \\unc path to root folder\%Username% - you can highlight all users in the OU and click properties, once you put in the path and click apply it will create a home folder for each user.

 

Sorted the creation of the folders for test users, not sure where to go with the GPO's: When I look inside the auto-created folders, I have Documents (with "My Pictures" inside) and My Documents (with "My Music" and "My Videos" inside). Ideally I'd like just an empty folder, or at worst just one folder called either "Documents" or "My Documents". These need to be accessible for all staff, but only the named pupil. I also want to set this up so that the files are not synchronised to the clients. I already have a policy on the Computers, so that nothing is synchronised to computers in the "Pupil Computers" OU and pupils don't see the local drive.

 

I think I have worked out the permissions, but I'm not sure about the synchronisation - I want to keep log on and log off times as short as possible, so don't want files up or downloading across wireless from slow netbooks.

 

Any advice or directions to existing threads very welcome.

 

Edit: As an aside, is it quicker to process one policy with lots of settings than have separate policies for different functions? Having multiple policies makes it easier to find my way through and I can give them logical names, but I could document that separately if combining into a single policy would speed things up.

Edited May 13, 2015 by jmak