Daily Cup of Tech

Here is another e-mail with a question whose answer could make all of our lives easier:

Hi Tim

Firstly can I congratulate you on a great site, I stumbled across it a few weeks ago and now visit each day.

Anyway I just wanted to ask if you had ever come across a program or utility that would enable a person to add computers to a workgroup and set user names, passwords, create drive mapping and an email profile for each user? I suppose a limited domain functionality for a workgroup.

Many Thanks and keep up the good work ;0)
Mark

Mark,
I’m glad you enjoy the site. I hope that I can continue to provide you with some useful information.

As for your technical question, I am going to make some assumptions:

1. You are configuring workstations that are working in a peer to peer network without a domain (hence the reference to “workgroup” in your question)
2. You want to be able to run a program that will automatically add specific users and passwords to the local system’s configuration
3. Create a unique e-mail profile in Outlook for each user
4. Create drive mappings for each user (to either a unique location per user or to the same location per user)

So, the way I see it, there are really four different things that need to be done. Two of these things (add computer to workgroup and add users to the system) would need to be done for each workstation and the other two (map drives and create e-mail profiles) need to be done per user.

Add Workstation to Workgroup

The first thing that you would like to do is add a workstation to a workgroup. This is a relatively simple thing to do using the Netdom utility provided in the Windows Resource Kit. Make sure you use version 1.8 as the new version does not work!. You can add it to the workgroup by simply typing the following command line:

Netdom Member \\Computername /JoinWorkGroup WorkGroupName

Make sure that you set Computername to the name of your computer and WorkGroupName to your workgroup.

Adding Users to the Workstation

To add users to a workstation, all you need is to use the following VBScript:

Set WSHShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
Set WshSysEnv = WshShell.Environment("PROCESS")

strComputer =WshSysEnv("COMPUTERNAME")

Set colAccounts = GetObject("WinNT://" & strComputer)
Set objUser = colAccounts.Create("user", "UserName")
objUser.SetPassword "Password"
objUser.SetInfo

Make sure that you set UserName to the user you want to create and Password to your selected password.

Creating Outlook Profiles

The Outlook profile can be created as a PRF file. Rather than walk you through the entire process, I will point you at an excellent tutorial by Outlook-Tips that will show you how it can be done.

You can then edit the PRF file for each user using either AutoIt or VBScript.

Map Network Drives

Mapping network drives is also quite simple. You could create an AutoIt script with the following command in it:

DriveMapAdd("O:","\\Server\Share")

Make sure that you set the proper drive and share for the account.

You can then compile this script and point the logon script for the workstation to it.

Conclusion

I hope this helps you out, Mark. It was a really good to see that all of this stuff is still in memory for me!

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