Herding users

“I can’t believe you gave Fred a faster system than me. He’s just a junior vice president!”

I love comments like this. Fortunately, I can flash my consultant card and pass the buck to the local sap with CIO on his or her door. Usually, the CIO gets revenge, however, by putting us in charge of moving the latest bevy of squawking users to a new batch of machines. And while these users want to know their systems are different and faster, they sure don’t want to see any changes. “Don’t change my desktop; just make it faster.”

One way to make this real easy is to employ roaming profiles under Windows 2000 and XP. This capability was technically available under Windows NT, but all those who tried it actually had their heads explode so no word of its effectiveness was ever confirmed. With 2000 and later, roaming profiles actually becomes usable, though with some caveats.

First, as with many Redmond technologies, what seems like a straightforward concept can quickly balloon into something that consumes massive quantities of network and system resources. Roaming profiles are absolutely no exception, with average profile sizes hovering around 50MB, with some going as high as 75MB or more. Now multiply that by a few hundred users and a forced download at logon; all of a sudden, gigabit to the desktop makes more sense than ever, especially around 9:00 a.m.

So if roaming profiles don’t make sense on your network, what’s the next step when seamlessly moving users to new hardware? Check your Windows XP My Computer interface and you’ll soon discover a Migrate Files and Settings wizard. For us admins, there’s a more appropriate variant in the Windows 2000 Server Resource Kit as well as the Windows XP Resource kit and Microsoft’s Web site. In this incarnation, the tool is called Fastwiz, and using it you can move a user’s IE favorites, application settings, Outlook Express e-mail, desktop settings and even select data files from any OS back to Windows 98 to any new XP machine.

A few tips, however: First, install your applications before running Fastwiz. Application settings don’t react well when they’re copied to a system lacking the necessary software hosts. Next, organize your data files before entering the Fastwiz system. If you can make this a global policy for all users, or even just all admins tasked with this chore, it’s possible to script Fastwiz processes, making migration even more automatic, though such an operation will require significant setup in advance.

What I’m looking for is a simple third-party user administration tool that offers some alternatives to Microsoft’s rather large user management software suite. To get full functionality out of Redmond, you’re most likely looking at SMS (Systems Management Server) and Microsoft IIS (Identity Integration Server). And even with these tools, the common problems associated with seamlessly moving users around still aren’t clearly addressed. Most of that stuff died out with Windows NT. There are some Windows 2000/2003 tools on the way from companies like ForensiT or existing products like Profile Maker from AutoProf, but the offerings are surprisingly limited, considering how common these chores have become.