We have a Windows network running in Workgroup mode with no server. There are around 14 machines on the network so it's clearly time we moved to a SBS 2008 server in domain mode. My question surrounds migration of user accounts to this domain setup.
There are multiple accounts on each machine, and some people have accounts on multiple machines. There are around 15 users in total plus some guest accounts for visitors. All of the machines are running Windows XP Pro but there is one Windows 7 laptop about to be added.
We want to transfer the profiles and not just create new accounts, and we probably want to move all the user's files to user home directories on the new server.
I've seen recommendations of USMT, moveuser.exe and ADMT in the past. I've also seen recommendations of migrating manually by creating the new accounts and then copying profiles across – though the last time I tried this method (around 2004) it was pretty messy. Using any of these methods would presumably mean we need to decide which machine we migrate from.
I'm expecting to be told we're going to need to do this fairly manually given the duplication of accounts across machines, but tips and good methods would be welcomed. How would you handle this situation and what potential issues and problems would you expect?
Best Answer
While I can't speak to having multiple profiles for the same user across multiple workstations, I will say that if SBS2008 is anything like SBS2003 it should do a pretty nice job of joining the computers to the domain and migrating the individual user profiles to domain profiles. Of course I'm talking about a scenario where there's one primary user per workstation, not multiples like you have. IMHO this is one of the strong points of SBS, making a migration from a workgroup to a domain as painless as possible. The "Add User Wizard" does a fairly nice job of assisting you in creating user and computer accounts based on your current user and computer names. I might suggest that you pick a "primary" user per workstation and use the "Add User Wizard" to "migrate" those users and profiles to the domain, as well as joining their computers to the domain. You can then go in after the migration and pick out the pieces you need from the various user profiles leftover that are scattered across the workstations.