As an administrator faced with the demanding task of an Active Directory migration, you need to know which machines are used by every client, which machines are used by multiple people and which employees log into them. This information can be very useful for support staff in general – but it really becomes a lifesaver when doing an AD migration or consolidation. You do not need a sophisticated third party auditing tool with an expensive support agreement. Just a one line capture script:

Echo %username%,%computername%,%userprofile% >> \\fileserver\share\logins.txt

This can be distributed with a Group Policy Object or a login script. You will have to give modifying permissions to Domain Users, so you may want to create a dedicated share for the txt file. The next step is to simply open it in Excel and use the spreadsheet’s hide duplicates feature. Now you have a simple list pairing users, machine names and profiles. This can be used to organize migration batches so that when specific departments are migrated, their machines can be identified and migrated with them. Also, if the machine fails to migrate, the affected user can be quickly spotted and contacted. The profile piece shows the folder path of their Windows profile. Usually, this matches their login ID (sAMAccountName) but in some cases (such as an earlier migration or account rename as a result of a change in marital status) the folder name may be different. If the profile does not migrate correctly, the original can be found without any guessing. This little one liner has saved countless hours of manual detective work for our clients who were planning a migration. It is best to roll it out as early as possible to capture logins for clients that may be on vacation or don’t reboot or logout as often as they should.

For more information, please contact us at info@rutter-net.com