Domain user profiles

  • Thread starter Thread starter mike sullivan
  • Start date Start date
M

mike sullivan

I administer 5 schools in the UK. We have an NT domain in
each school with users logging on to the domain from any
workstation in the school. We are going to upgrade to XP
later this year and to 2003server at a later date (next
year probably). We have to upgrade piecemeal (holidays
are not long enough!)and will have a mix of Win95, NT4,
W2000 and XP workstations logging on to the NT4 domain
server.
My query relates to setting up a default user profile (as
with NT4) on the XP workstations so that it can be used
by users who are logging on to the domain and NOT the
workstation. In
(Mycomputer\properties\advanced\settings\userprofiles)the
copy button is greyed out for all the domain users.

Does anyone have any ideas about how to get round this?
i haven't been able to find anything in the knowledgebase
that helps. as an aside I can't find a way of changing
to a roaming profile either as that is greyed out too.
 
Hi, Mike -

Couple things you can do here. One would be to relocate
user profiles to a domain controller and use roaming
profiles at least temporarily.

Maybe I'm not clear on your requirements, but I think
there's another solution. The 'default user' profile on
a Windows XP machine contains settings for all local
profiles created on that machine.

You can create a profile, install applications, set up
menus and desktops and then overwrite the default user
profile with your new and improved default user
settings. Any user account added after the 'default
user' profile is modified will get the new settings.

This is pretty easy to do - and since you already know
how to copy user profiles I'm not gonna go into great
detail - other than to tell you that neither the source
nor target profile may be open when you copy a profile -
so you can create a profile, log on as Administrator and
copy to 'default user' if you like.

It's a good idea not to use the Administrator profile as
a template, though.

Hope this helps -
 
Thaks for your prompt reply. I had been thinking that
anyone with Admin rights could copy a profile as one can
in NT4 even your own open one. As you say, once I log
on as the Local administrator, all is possible. With
the exception of the desktop wallpaper, which doesn't
seem to carry over to the new user (and doesn't matter
anyway) everything else seems to be there.

Thanks again,

Mike
 
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