Profile and domain advice

[mrstephenw]

Hi Guys,

 

Well, I'm really looking for a piece of best practice more than anything and I think I have an idea about how I'm gonna tackle this one, but thought I'd float it on here and make sure I'm not missing anything.

 

Most computers in the primary school where I work are members of a domain (Server 2003 & XP Clients) however there are a few computers that buck this trend and are not members of the domain.

 

I want to clean up the school and make all classroom PCs members of the domain.

 

One of the problems that I foresee is that teachers are already actively using a profile either locally or using network administrator access. This is something that I've allowed to go on for too long now and we're tightening the belt.

 

Ideally I'd like each teacher to be using their own login (which they have been setup) instead of administrator. The problem is they now have documents/settings on the local/network administrator profile that I'd like to 'seemlesly' transport to their own profile.

 

What's the best way to do this?

 

Stephen

[jsnetman]

You could script it, For example the user logs on to the domain with their domain user account you include a logon batch file to copy/move the contents from the local admins account to their server my docs. Providing they have been using same machine to login as local admin.

[mrstephenw]

That's one way I guess jsnetman, thanks for sharing that. Would this method therefore only copy the My Documents of the user?

 

It's worth pointing out that there's only a handful of PCs/teachers that have found themselves in this predicament. (maybe 5 or 6)

 

Maybe now would be a good opportunity to share what I envisage the process to be and tell me if I'm missing anything . . .

 

I'd like to go round each PC and copy the profile

 

System Properties > Advanced > User Profile

 

Then copy this to their 'new' user account. Am I right in thinking that this would be seamless? Am I missing something?

[SYNACK]

Yes this should work out reasonably seamlessly as long as the ntfs permissions are set right so that the teacher has full rights to their profile on the domain server then it should just load up without a problem.

 

The one thing that could cause an issue it the size of the documents that they have alraey in their existing profiles, if there are lots this could make for very long logons so you would want to use folder redirection in group policy if it is not already in use and move the documents from the profiles to the documents shares so that they are not loaded fro the server to the workstation each logon but rather are stored on the server and accessed from there.

[mrstephenw]

Thanks SYNACK, I'll take these suggestions into account when I make the changes.