Promoting students and leavers in active directory (how do I?)

[Martian]

Recently started a part time post supporting the AD/backend at a school, and I've noticed that students are in year group OU's that still need to be moved up a year and the leavers migrated into an already existing leavers folder for this term. The thing is the support previously supporting the school has since left so i'm trying to make sense of how it was set up. Looks like it was done a long time ago i know that much, and the last school i was at, I didn't have to worry about this as it was set up as year of intake.

 

Can you advise me how to move the students up into new year groups so the new group policies for the year they are in apply and their home folders etc move too. Simply moving a pupil from year x to year y didn't seem to have the desired effect or maybe it did but the folder redirection hadn't populated when i tested the login. In theory, bulk moving the leavers into the leavers folder then working backwards seems like the cleanest method but something tells me this has been set up is a particular way and needs a little more attention to detail.

 

In between time I'm exploring the logic/ease of redesign things either through intake or simplifying things further and migrating to adsync.

 

For the immediate fix, promoting is what i'd like to do when I'm next in.

 

Thanks in advance

[halbaradkenafin]

Working from the last year and moving them to Leavers then working from there is definitely the best way to handle it. I'd look at the group policies to make sure any folder redirection will still work for those groups. Moving home folders will be reasonably easy after that as it will be the same process as for AD, but will probably take a while longer depending on how much they save in the folders.

 

Edit: You could easily script this with Powershell but I'd probably get the manual process out of the way first and then work on that separately. Moving to a system using intake year is probably a good idea though, I'm not sure why many schools use year group OUs rather than intake years since the amount of work to start a new year is considerably more than is really needed.

Edited September 14, 2015 by halbaradkenafin

[Martian]

I didn't get to give this a shot today but i noticed all individual student user areas/home folders directs to one folder called student data. So perhaps i can just move users up each year and then add them to the new year group / remove them from the previous???

 

Move container and add to group basically? or are their a few more steps. will i be ok to just move leavers to leavers folder and disable accounts.

 

finally, will this claim back storage being used by current leavers not yet migrated?

[halbaradkenafin]

I didn't get to give this a shot today but i noticed all individual student user areas/home folders directs to one folder called student data. So perhaps i can just move users up each year and then add them to the new year group / remove them from the previous???

 

Move container and add to group basically? or are their a few more steps.

 

That should work fine.

 

will i be ok to just move leavers to leavers folder and disable accounts.

 

That's what we do with leavers here.

 

finally, will this claim back storage being used by current leavers not yet migrated?

 

You'll have to delete the leavers work to get the storage back. But I'd assume the school will want to keep hold of it for a little while in case any of them come back asking for work. Our policy is just keep the work for around a year and delete it then, we've still got a copy on backup if they really need it but we assume that after a year they probably would have come to get it if it was that important.

[Ripleys]

We found what works best for us is to assign them to the enrollment year "2011/2012/2013/etc" instead of the year group such as "Year 7/8/9/etc"

 

This way instead of moving people through the groups we just create a new group each year and rename the last group to leavers.

 

Or am I just missing what you're getting at?

[Gibson335]

We found what works best for us is to assign them to the enrollment year "2011/2012/2013/etc" instead of the year group such as "Year 7/8/9/etc"

 

This way instead of moving people through the groups we just create a new group each year and rename the last group to leavers.

 

Or am I just missing what you're getting at?

 

This is what we do - so perhaps I've also missed the point of the question. Once we create them we never touch them again until they leave.

[Ripleys]

Can you advise me how to move the students up into new year groups so the new group policies for the year they are in apply and their home folders etc move too. Simply moving a pupil from year x to year y didn't seem to have the desired effect or maybe it did but the folder redirection hadn't populated when i tested the login. In theory, bulk moving the leavers into the leavers folder then working backwards seems like the cleanest method but something tells me this has been set up is a particular way and needs a little more attention to detail.

 

What I am gathering from this is that it is a GPO issue. Maybe changing the linked OU and/or security filtering options will resolve this? Don't take my word for it though