Replacing an old employees rights with a new employee username...

[Brad Pears]

We have a situation where our executive secretary has left the company and
is being replaced by a new person within a week. Sse has access to many
folders within the domain etc.. and some are pretty specific (as opposed to
simply group access rights). We have a win2000 SBS server where her profile
exists in our domain. We also have an NT 4.0 server (not in the domain). She
has a profile on this machine as well with a lot of "file specific" rights
to stuff on that particular server.

Is there any easy way to convert all of her security rights over to the new
user or do you basically have to go through everything and try to find all
the instances where she is on the security list and replace herusername
with the new username? There must be a better way...

Thanks,

Brad

 

[Danny Sanders]

Rename the old secretary's account to the new user.


hth
DDS W 2k MVP MCSE

 

[Steve Parry [MVP]]

In

We have a situation where our executive secretary has left the
company and is being replaced by a new person within a week. Sse has
access to many folders within the domain etc.. and some are pretty
specific (as opposed to simply group access rights). We have a
win2000 SBS server where her profile exists in our domain. We also
have an NT 4.0 server (not in the domain). She has a profile on this
machine as well with a lot of "file specific" rights to stuff on that
particular server.

Is there any easy way to convert all of her security rights over to
the new user or do you basically have to go through everything and
try to find all the instances where she is on the security list and
replace herusername with the new username? There must be a better
way...

Can you not just rename the old account to the new employees username?

 

[Brad Pears]

Well how do you like that! I didn't even see the option to do this in the
NT 4.0 User Manger for Domains application. When you double click the user
in there, there is no way to rename an account. After poking around a bit
more, I found the "rename" function on the "User" file option...

Thanks for that!!

 

[Brad Pears]

I was trying to do this on NT 4.0 "User Manager for Domains" app. and found
that when you double click a user, you cannot rename the "username" field.
However, after some poking around, I did see it in the 'Users' menu option!

Thanks for that!!!

 

[Dave Nickason [SBS MVP]]

I used to rename the accounts when people changed jobs, but I quit because
of some resulting aggravation. However, Brad's situation with the carefully
set permissions seems like a great candidate for renaming.

The things you need to look out for when you rename the "Sue" account to
"Jane" would be a lot of residual stuff in the user profile. For example,
Sue probably had many programs registered to her and using her user
information. The properties of Word docs may list Sue as the author instead
of Jane. We use scanning software that automatically adds file properties
based on a username stored in the registry. That type of thing. I would
end up with work attributed to one user but actually done by another. We
have a lot of situations in which it's important to us to know who actually
did certain work, and we were running into issues with renamed accounts in
that context.

You can get around a lot of this stuff by searching the registry for the
username and the actual name of the terminated employee, replacing those
with the info for the replacement.

 

[Simon]

For future reference, to avoid this kind of trouble, I would create a group
and give that group the required permissions.

Even if the group normally only has the one user you can easily add/remove
new users as required.

Simon

 

[Steve Parry [MVP]]

Well how do you like that! I didn't even see the option to do this
in the NT 4.0 User Manger for Domains application. When you double
click the user in there, there is no way to rename an account. After
poking around a bit more, I found the "rename" function on the "User"
file option...

Thanks for that!!

Glad to have helped Brad

 

[SuperGumby [SBS MVP]]

for my money, this is the right answer.

For future reference, to avoid this kind of trouble, I would create a group
and give that group the required permissions.

Even if the group normally only has the one user you can easily add/remove
new users as required.

Simon

 

[Brad Pears]

I absolutely agree. I think from now on where we wind up having to gove
specific rights, crating a new group for that purpose and placing even just
the one user in it makes sense.

Thanks for everyone's input!