need advice on server install

[aspenjim]

How do I maintain exact user profiles going from a peer to peer network to SBS2003. In other words, When I join clients to the domain, I don't want to have to reconfigure (or copy into the new account) all desktops, documents, email and favorites etc. I would like the upgrade to be fairly transparent to current users and keep my work minimal.

When I do this I am going to implement folder redirection for my first time as described here and need the install to go as smoothly as possible while taking my skills to the level.

Edited December 21, 2006 by aspenjim

[FAT64]

You can certainly copy current profiles to a network share, plus when you redirect the My Documents folders I'm sure there is a setting to copy across any existing files when they first logon.

[cluberti]

USMT was designed to do exactly this, and it's scriptable.

[aspenjim]

Looks like an awesome tool. I will report back after some experimenting.

edit... All I can say is how cool is this!!!! I have countless times backed up clients profiles the manual way (copy and paste) and obviously wasted countless hours and lots of harddrive space.

I absolutely love this forum.

Thanks Cluberti and everyone for all the helpfulness up to now.

Edited December 22, 2006 by aspenjim

[cluberti]

Not a problem - good luck

[fizban2]

aspenjim, make sure you get teh version 3.0 of USMT, it is faster and runs quite well just finished automating it for work and it works wonders

[aspenjim]

I did get 3.0. Fizban, would you briefly explain how you automated it? Prolly what Cluberti meant by scriptable. Remember I'm a noob at such things, but am learning quickly.

[fizban2]

what i wrote was a HTA (hypertext Application) that will prompt you for location and credentials for backing up a machine based on computer name. basically all you have to do is start the USMT hta and enter your credentials and hit scan or load and it will take care of the rest if you wanted to do something easier you could do something as easy as writing a VB script to help deal with all the command line stuff you have to write for it, let me finish writing up the HTA i have and i will try and turn it into a template you can work with.

[aspenjim]

I got the server installed this weekend and everything went great. However, I made an interesting discovery. I'm quite resistant to wizards and SBS 2003 has lots of them. I've installed 4 SBS servers this year now and this is the fist one that I ran the http://server/connectcomputer wizard to attach them to the domain. What I've done in the past is set up users on the server and then ran the "network Identification wizard" on the client PC to attach to the domain. The SBS wizard has an option of selecting the current user and in essence "migrating" the settings to the new domain user account. It tells me to make sure to uncheck "keep the documents private box". That box was never checked anyway, so in order to get throught the wizard, I checked it, let it apply the settings, then unchecked it. Long story short, it did also what I wanted it to do when I started this thread perfectly. It even didn't make a new account, nor any accounts had a .000 eg Administrator.000 accounts. Everything was very clean. All I had to do

Question is "is it possible to do this with a standard 2003 server"? I know that wizard isn't available, but that was so clean that there has to be a similar way. I tried the scanstate/loadstate method of USMT 3.0 in a test environment and it worked, but still took extra time, both ways. I'm a little hesitant to use it until I've practiced a few times in order not to loose documents. I know it must work if enterprise domain admins rely on it.