User Management

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  bconr wrote:

  I have seen some posts talking about User Management as it relates to roaming profile type features. However, I haven't seen that discussion in this Suggestions thread.

  You haven't looked very hard. I just did a search for "roaming" and got nearly 30 hits from probably 8-10 different threads. It's not been discussed to death, however.
  

  bconr wrote:

  So here are my suggestions. Synchronize User accounts on all PCs based on WHS users. If a user exists on the WHS then automatically create that account on the managed PCs. Synchronize things like IE Favorites on all managed PCs for each WHS user. Apparently this is possible but very complicated and not really a supported feature. Show a report of the Users on each PC, the access level of each user and if the acocunt is synchronized to WHS. I think for the average user (ie my wife adn kids), they just want want to be able to login to any PC in the house and have a similar setup.

  Syncing user accounts with WHS can be done several ways. For desktop machines at home, you can redirect My Documents and the user shell folders using some combination of TweakUI, the built-in My Documents redirection in current versions of Windows, registry edits, and/or other third party tools. For laptops, you may want a combination of redirection and Offline Folders (Offline Folders requires a business SKU of XP or Vista). I'll mention that you probably don't want to use Offline Folders to sync your media collection. This isn't particularly complex to implement, though it will take a little while if you have a lot of accounts on a lot of PCs. Doing this will get the same "My Favorites" onto every PC you set up for any user you want to do it for.
  
  I don't want to synchronize user accounts onto all my client PCs. My wife doesn't need an id on my office workstation, and I don't need one on hers. The kids don't need ids on mom or dad's workstation either.
  

  Wednesday, June 20, 2007 3:30 PM

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  Regarding user account sync, I can see both sides of this argument...

   

  Personally, I'm with Ken.  I build my various machines for the tasks they'll perform:  Gaming rig for me, Business laptop for me, Home/Photoshop PC for my wife, Kid's PC...  As such, each is capable of doing different things, so I'd typically change machine, based on task.  (Basically, everyone uses their own damn computer )

   

  However, "non-geek" households probably don't do things this way...  I'd guess that your "standard" household buys 4 Dells at once: Kitchen, Office, Son, Daughter (Dad's office laptop doesn't count); and they are all relatively the same.  In that case, a household might well use the closest machine for any given task.  So, for this particular item, I can see the desire for that functionality, but PLEASE don't make it mandatory.

  Wednesday, June 20, 2007 5:06 PM
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  I agree, mandatory would be a bad thing, but being able to allocate users to machines from the WHS would be an excellent addition.  Reading posts about TweakUI and Registry edits is enough to put me off. 

   

  An ability to allocate the users based on either an adhoc or permenant basis would allow:

  1) Each person in the house to have a home machine where they could do most of their work and rely on their own locally installed applications

  2) Allow them access to a shared workstation (or two) where the backup of their My Documents, Internet Favourites and email config could be access from the WHS for the duration of their session and then disconnected at logout.

   

  In our family, each person has their own machine, but there are always times when we (or guests) want to jump on the internet and google the answer to some frustrating question, at the moment that means giving them access to one of the family members machines (and files and favourites etc)

   

  Thanks

  
  Dave

  Thursday, June 21, 2007 11:21 AM