NTFS Permission Saga

[AlexInspireTrust]

Hi all,

 

I have recently been tasked with creating an all new Exam system for our College. I have set this up with Exam Users' Documents being redirected via Folder Redirection to a Shared documents area per exam account type but am running into an issue.

 

The issue I am having is that I have configured the NTFS permissions on the Root folder where the Documents are stored (in a share) so that "CREATOR OWNER" gets Full Control to Subfolders and Files which works absolutely fine when the users log in and create their work in the exam etc. The issue arises when the Exam Managers need to drop an Exam paper into the Documents area of the Exam Users Account, the Exam Managers can put this file in but the file does not inherit any permissions for the Exam User to be able to open/access it.

 

A blanket fix would be to apply a "Exam Takers GROUP" NTFS permission to the root folder but this could potentially give ExamUser001 access to ExamUser002's documents and this cannot be permitted.

 

Does anyone else have a possible solution to this?

 

Manually assigning NTFS permissions for each Users Documents folder (e.g: Giving Full Control to "ExamUser001" to "ExamUser001") is not an option as we have around 1000 accounts with this issue and this would require way too much time to complete.

 

Any advice would be much appreciated!

 

Thanks,

Alex

[DavR]

In this scenario, wouldn't you have the share set as user's home drive in Active Directory? When you set the share eg \\examshare\user1 in AD per user, this should grant the specific AD user account full control over the \\examshare\user1 folder.

 

With this in place, I'd expect any files you drop in \\examshare\user1 to pick up the correct perms to allow the user account access.

[AlexInspireTrust]

Thanks for the reply Dave,

 

I will implement this on one of the users for testing and see if this resolves the issue. If this is the case I can implement this change via a GPO rather than manually setting in AD.

 

I'm not sure why i defaulted to Folder Redirection & Drive Mapping, It's something that was in place when I joined this position and so I carried it across intuitively.

 

Thanks again, I'll update on here my findings!

[DavR]

If you're going to use a redirected folder as a user's home share, best practice is that the user should always have full control of the folder, however you choose to work the redirection.

 

Best of luck Alex

[AlexInspireTrust]

Perfect! The Home Drive mapping does indeed seem to give the user full permission to the folder, which in turn means that anything dragged into this folder is now accessible by them.

 

Thank you for the suggestion and solving my most recent headache

[DavR]

Great news - problem solved, and welcome to the EduGeek community!