Keeping user profiles when switching domain.

[Hans Gustavsson]

We are about to migrate all our desktop computers into
our corporate AD from various workgroups and nt4 domains
and I am not sure how I can handle the user profiles so
that a minimum of work needs to be done at each machine.

As it is now all users are local administrators on their
machines (which will be dealt with through GPOs later on)
and very little centralized management of the
clientcomputers are made.

If we need to handle it through copying of the profiles
one by one how should I go about doing this to avoid as
many problems as possible.

/regards
Hans

 

[Jason Hall [MSFT]]

--------------------

Sender: "Hans Gustavsson" <[email protected]>
Subject: Keeping user profiles when switching domain.
Date: Tue, 1 Jun 2004 03:30:44 -0700

We are about to migrate all our desktop computers into
our corporate AD from various workgroups and nt4 domains
and I am not sure how I can handle the user profiles so
that a minimum of work needs to be done at each machine.

As it is now all users are local administrators on their
machines (which will be dealt with through GPOs later on)
and very little centralized management of the
clientcomputers are made.

If we need to handle it through copying of the profiles
one by one how should I go about doing this to avoid as
many problems as possible.

/regards
Hans

-----------------------

You can either ...
a) Specify a profile path for each domain user, and then copy that
particular user's ntuser.dat file to the path
or
b) Let the user log in at their workstation, then log in as a different
user and copy the ntuser.dat file to their local profile folder

These are the two simplest ways that come to mind. There are no doubt some
more complex methods (involving some fancy scripting), but that will
increase the potential "problems" that could arise.



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[Torgeir Bakken \(MVP\)]

We are about to migrate all our desktop computers into
our corporate AD from various workgroups and nt4 domains
and I am not sure how I can handle the user profiles so
that a minimum of work needs to be done at each machine.

As it is now all users are local administrators on their
machines (which will be dealt with through GPOs later on)
and very little centralized management of the
clientcomputers are made.

Hi

You can reuse the old profile with the "new" user by changing the new
user's ProfileImagePath in registry to point to the old profile.

More here:
http://groups.google.com/[email protected]