"Best practices" way for creating a home directory

[Guru42]

I know this question gets asked from time to time, wanted a fresh perspective. Searching MS doesn't seem to be a "best practices" way for creating a home directory is there one? As in GPO drive map versus AD home directory creation in user object?

 

At my current location they use GPO for drive mappings and have always used that method:

 

Drive Map (Drive: H)

H: (Order: 6)

Action Update

PropertiesLetter H

Location \\server\users\%username%

Reconnect Enabled

 

Currently with the Home Drive H: using GPO there are intermittent issues with it not working. Other drives created with GPO working, just issues with home. Only difference with home is variable used --> %username%

 

I "grew up" in networking learning directory services from the world of Novell Netware and have taken that experience over to the world of MS Active Directory. I remember learning NW Admin where the home directory was created as part of creating a user object, creating users from user template objects.

 

Now that I have suggested creating the home drive in AD where I am now, I get asked to document the reasons for wanting to change things. It sets you back a step when some challenges why you do things a certain way when you've doing that way with no problems for years.

 

Searching for answers on Microsoft site difficult at times looking for best practices. You can find numerous ways on how to do things, but how to do it is not always best practices for using it.

[synaesthesia]

I have no idea why anyone would ever use GPO to map home drives when AD will do it all for you with the correct permissions out of the box. Plus it's just generally easier and reliable. That's not really a case of best practice, that's generally how it's done. Of course you *can* do it via GPO, you *can* script it, but doesn't mean you should. If there's a provided way to do something generally (but not always) it's the best way. Plus, group policy can and does fail for a variety of reasons, it's highly unlikely the home drive mapped via AD will fail so if something goes wrong the user will at least have access to their documents and will have minimal impact on their productivity.

[Guru42]

I have no idea why anyone would ever use GPO to map home drives when AD will do it all for you with the correct permissions out of the box. Plus it's just generally easier and reliable. That's not really a case of best practice, that's generally how it's done. Of course you *can* do it via GPO, you *can* script it, but doesn't mean you should. If there's a provided way to do something generally (but not always) it's the best way. Plus, group policy can and does fail for a variety of reasons, it's highly unlikely the home drive mapped via AD will fail so if something goes wrong the user will at least have access to their documents and will have minimal impact on their productivity.

 

I agree with you 100%, but when you come into an environment your co-workers don't always appreciate your years of experience, and you are still the "new guy" with "new ideas." Having to provide reasons for making changes to do things that you state, " that's generally how it's done," can be a bit frustrating. My apologies if this sounds like a rant, but just giving my perspective for asking the questions.

 

Thanks for the feedback!

[ricki]

People map drives to home folders because older programs don't always use urls and need a mapped drive plus if you use thing like foldr it makes life a lot easier Richard