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TiernanO
Asked: 2011-10-21 02:31:14 +0800 CST

New Active Directory domain for small Dev shop, moving users data to domain account

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We have decided that it is time to build a domain in our smallish office, and i have been tasked with the job. The Domain is setup, and we are in the process of creating usernames and passwords for users. Since the users all have existing machines (mostly laptops) and have been using them for some time now, when they join the domain, their settings are going to go "missing" for them... they wont be on their desktop, and their documents folder will be somewhere else...

What i am looking for is a quick and easy way of moving their documents, settings, desktops, etc, from their old login account, to their new domain based account... at minimum, this should be files in their "My Documents" folder and Desktop, but moving settings and mail for Outlook, Visual Studio, IE/FireFox/, etc, would be handy too.

I have read about the Microsoft User State Migration Tool, but unless i am reading wrong, it seems to be setup for moving from one machine to another, not from one account to another... Any ideas?

migration active-directory user-settings

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    When I've had to do something similar, I used a couple short scripts to help me copy the contents of the profile.

    1. Add a share on the server to temporarily hold profile contents
    2. Write a script that creates a new folder based on logged in username, and uploads the files you're interested in. (e.g. Desktop, My Documents, Favorites, specific AppData)
    3. Log into the workstation with the new Active Directory credentials, then use a second script to copy all the files of interest from the server back into the user profile.

    This won't migrate any settings stored in the registry, or printers the user has added, or certificates the user has installed. Depending on your environment, that might be acceptable.

    Personally, I would look at this as an opportunity to set everybody up with clean user profiles in a known state. This should simplify any troubleshooting you need to do with your new domain environment.

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  2. I came across a blog post which seems to cover a situation very similar to yours. They were migrating user profiles from one domain to another, while you are migrating local profiles into a new domain.

    The basic concept is that you can modify the machine registry so that the new domain user account uses the original local user profile, including the original NTUSER.DAT which stores the user's private registry settings. The settings can be found here:

    HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList\

    This is a bit harder than just copying the user data, but it would also result in fewer complaints from the users. :-)

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