Active Directory Users Naming/Logon Convention

[marley1]

So I have a client that I am swapping from workgroup from domain with a new server. This client has two offices. The satelite office is only open a day or two a week.

Normally I will create a user - FirstInitialLastName (John Doe...jdoe).

This works in 90% of the setups. This one client is a medical office with 3 reception computers in the main office and 2 reception computers in satelite office.

Creating a user for each receptionist wont work as chances are they will not sign off and on.

So I can either create just a receptionst login that they all can share which will work out good since I deploy Folder Redirection, but I am not sure how well Folder Redirection will work over wan to satelite office.

So I was curious what you guys do for shared/general logins.

 

[sinisterDei]

That's really two questions. I'm assuming the satellite offices are connected via VPN or you wouldn't even be having this conversation.

Depending on their data use, expectations and WAN link quality, you might well be able to get away with the satellite office having their Documents/Desktop redirected.

In general, though, I'd guess that one of those three - data use, expectations, WAN link - might make the situation untenable. In that case, I simply wouldn't try. This is a situation where a Terminal Server might come in handy, which is a solution we've used many times for clients with remote workers or satellite office. Aside from watching videos or flash animations, they're much more bandwidth friendly, and I'm assuming that these two offices are sharing data so it would make that situation much happier for all involved.

 

[sinisterDei]

Oh, as for the single receptionist login vs unique logons. I wouldn't go with a single logon, especially if you end up with the remote users operating via folder redirection over the WAN link. I can just imagine the Offline Folders reconciliation nightmares that might cause. I would assign a generic logon for each workstation (office1, office2, office3, etc), then assign them a shared mapped drive. That would facilitate operation independently or on a terminal server type environment, while still being easy to maintain on a day to day basis. They can all share a password, but I'd keep the accounts separate.

 

[marley1]

Yeah, I was thinking that as well, but not going that far. Just have receptionist and receptionist2. The ones that the main office would probably benefit from having the same icons on each machine.

There is a VPN involved. Connection is 15/5 on each side. It should only be a 100MB or so on the my documents. The satelite office does RDP in for a LOB application, but the satelite office doesn't do much as far as documents go.

 

[sinisterDei]

I would think they'd be fine, then. Depending on expectations, people can put up with a lot of crap if it's what they're used to. One of our clients, until recently, had an office of ten folks that accessed their primary network share over a single point-to-point 1.5mb link. That's ten folks opening, using, saving data to a Windows network share chock full of Word, Excel, PDFs, etc over a T1-speed connection they also used for internet access. And they lived with it that way for *years* before we got there. It's all in the expectations.