cheeseslice

thanks for the quick replies. I should have said in my original post that I actually have an ou called users, with staff and students below that. For the mapped drives I had thought about using a group policy linked to users to map everything and then excluding students from the drives that I don't want them to see. Or would it be best to have completely separate policies do you think? Once the server is up and running and everything is connected they are on their own, they don't have any IT support at all so I would imagine one of the teachers will be taking control. The backups are purely for coursework. The server only has 2x250gb sata in raid1, the external drives are 1Tb. I had just thought about doing a full backup each evening. As far as wiping the machines goes there are a few issues. My intention was to wipe all of them before hand so that everything was fresh but I only found out that the machines were bought with 7 home pre-installed, no discs were included. So I have no way of wiping the machines. As far as I know they bought the upgrades online and had 20 discs sent out with 20 different keys, I think they paid £30 per machine. I had thought about WDS for this but more than likely it will be a lot less hassle to just put in the discs and let them run. Just as a matter of interest, what way do you rebuild a machine? I was going to set up group policies to install software but there are so few machines and so little software I don't know if it would be worth the effort. I was thinking that it might be best to create an image of a machine with everything installed and let them use that to wipe the computer when something goes wrong, though there is no money for 3rd party imaging software. I will probably offer to do some remote administration for them but at the minute they don't have a static ip so that is something else they need to get sorted. I take it most people on this forum would work on site? I'm thinking a vpn connection to their server is probably going to be the best bet.

Hello all, This is my first post and I hoping that some of you can point me in the right direction as I don't quite know what the normal requirements would be for a domain in an education environment. I have been asked to help with an upgrade for a small school. It currently has 20 computers running windows 7 home and one network printer. Each computer has the latest student edition of office installed. The network is only being used for training students on microsoft office and web applications, nothing else. What they would like is for each computer to be upgraded to windows 7 professional and connected to their new server running 2008 r2. I have installed the os on the server and set up the ad to have 3 main ou's, computers, students and staff. Within students I then created ou's for each intake year 2011 and 2012 at the minute. The point I am now is group policies, mapping drives, folder redirection and roaming profiles. I have a few questions I'm hoping I can get some help with. How tightly do you lock down the work station using gpo's? Do you differentiate between staff and students or leave them the same and let admins have all the rights? Does anyone use folder redirection and roaming profiles? I see the point in folder redirection for backup but if you are very restrictive on the staff and students is there much point in their profile roaming? For backups I intend to have 2 external usb drives swapping each night, would this be acceptable? The workstations currently have office installed, for different reasons I can't wipe these machines before connecting them to the domain. Does anyone know of any problems I might encountered once I connect them to the domain and use folder redirection? Thanks in advance