Transfer all settings and files to new AD user

Question

We have a domain enviroment with 100 user. We have 300 colleague in the company. We have many officies and we used one user account / officies.

We bought a new sever, and we bought 300 user CAL because we would like to dedicate a uniqe profile to every colleague.

So we bought the CAL, and generated the new user profile. We did everyting on back-and. Now we have to enroll each user with the new/unique account.

The problem is how to transfer the files under the "[e-mail]" profile folder to the new enrolled folder via remotely! (And i mean not remote desktop. I need a solution which automatically made this changes when user log in)

We have to migrate:

• files from documents, desktop
• printers
• explorer settings /certificates, history, favorites..etc.../

Is there any way to do this?

We use Windows XP and Windows 7

Thank you for any suggestion

Answer 1

How To:

Files: I would have everyone run a script that basically looks in common file places and copies to a share with their new username.

copy %userprofile%\Desktop \\ServerBackup\%newUserName%\Desktop
copy %userprofile%\Downloads\\ServerBackup\%newUserName%\Downloads

Just find what directories you are going to support, and write the script, fairly easy here.

For printers, you can add to your script WMI queries to get basic printer information easily. look at:

wmic printer get /?

To decide which atttributes give you the information you need. If the printers are already on a file server, then you can remap the drives on the new profile easily with:

\\printServer\PrinterName

For explorer settings, I would not mess with these. Favorites can be backed up from %userprofile%\favorites

I would not dig much deeper, some things will not transfer correctly, and there would be a lot of registry digging. It would probably be easier to find the most important / common settings and apply them to the new profiles on the restore / login script.

Once the user logs in, have them run a restore script, that copies everything you backed up to the local profile.

As long as you use the environment variables, like %userprofile% you should not need different scripts for XP and 7.

Do thorough testing, domain changes are always a good time. You want to be sure you have it right before you roll it out and find that GP broke something simple, or that you missed some key directories.

This is a short and simple way to do it at least, although perhaps not the most robust.

Answer 2

Deploy Roaming User Profiles; Windows 8, Windows Server 2012

Configuring Roaming User Profiles; Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2003 with SP1, Windows Server 2003 with SP2

VideO:

How to Set Up Roaming Profiles, User Files, and Connect to a Domain 18 min 50 sec.