Exam account logon availability

[Bertie_Dellend]

Exam season is upon us - I am sure like many others, we have specific, locked down exam accounts which are assigned to pupils for exam purposes.

 

What I find a pain in the neck however is that we have numerous exams which take place over a few days at different times. For example, we have art exam students who use the same accounts over 4 days at different times each day:doh: And we have numerous subjects like this!

 

Consequently I have to make sure that I enable all these accounts just before the exam starts and then disable them when the exam finishes.

 

The logon hours feature in AD is far too rigid to cope with this. Does anyone know of an application that can enable / disable user accounts by date and time?

 

Cheers in anticipation

[pete]

We create an Exams root OU with per-subject sub-OUs in AD. We delegate enable/disable rights to accounts in the sub-OUs to the relevant departmental security groups.

 

We then publish a custom locked down MMC as a remoteapp (requires 2008) from a terminal server, one per subject. Then it's up to the individual dept to lock and unlock as they need them.

 

Works well, doesn't require any action our part beyond setting up.

[AlexB]

We took a slightly different approach...

 

To save on one side of the problem we didn't disable any accounts. Instead we changed the password at the teacher's request and then they issue the password when they want the account used. That way the account is effectively disabled until issued by the teacher. Then the teacher just rings up to set a new password once done to "disable" the account(s).