Welcome

Who am I?

Philip L. Sullivan

MCT, MCSE, MCSA

Microsoft Certified Trainer for 6 Years

Work as a Lead Windows NT\2000\2003 Instructor for Clark University’s CCI for 4 years.

Employed full time as Network Manager for Belmont Public Schools and the Town of Belmont for 5 years.

What am I going to cover?

We have 6 short presentations

An introduction to Windows 2000 and 2003

An introduction to Active Directory

An introduction to implementing Group Policy

How do we use Group Policy to manage a user environment

How do we use Group Policy to manage software

Remote desktop and remote support

How long is the Seminar?

Approximately a 2 Hour Lecture mixed and demonstrations

½ Hour discussion or questions

What is this Intellimirror stuff?

Group Policy is the foundation of Microsoft Intellimirror IntelliMirror is a set of management technologies built into

Microsoft Windows 2000/2003 that provide desktop change and configuration management. With IntelliMirror, users' data, personal computer settings, and computing environment follow them to other locations.

Essentially, IntelliMirror provides users with follow-me functionality for their personal computing environment. Users have constant access to all of their information and software, whether or not they are connected to the network.

IntelliMirror allows an administrator to set policy definitions once and be confident that the policy will be applied without further administrative intervention.

Do the next few comments sound familiar?

Monday Morning

Damn you Microsoft, you keep coming out with these security patches and I cant keep up with it. Why cant you create a secure operating system from the start? If I miss an update our network may be toast. What am I going to do?

I am fixing the computer that the Library Director uses and it turns out that I need to make a change on the server to fix the problem but the server is at the Town Hall. Why cant Microsoft make life easier for me? I don’t have any 3rd party tools because of my budget and now I have to drive over to the Town hall to make the server change, this is ridiculous.

Monday Afternoon

Joanne from the Assessors Office just called me because the file that she was editing on the server is now missing. I know it was there yesterday, did someone delete it? I will restore it from backup and when I have time I will find out what happened.

Tracy drops in to my office because her computer is acting up again. This is the 3rd time in a week that she has been having problems and its driving me crazy. I suspect she is making changes to her workstation so I have to somehow restrict these changes. I will have to find a way to do this because she is driving me batty.

I just got a call from Matt in the Selectmens Office, and he says he just tried to open Access and it is asking for disk 2. I know I did a full install last week, what happened? There has to be a better way…

Tuesday

Tony, my boss, calls me for the 3rd time in a month because his workstation just crashed. What the heck is he doing? He needs his own personal technician. How can if find out what he does? How could I have avoided this??

I am on my way to a seminar to listen to a Microsoft Certified Trainer talk about how to utilize Group Policy to my advantage. But my entire tech support staff of 2 called in sick because they are overworked from all the problems that they say I created. I now get a phone call from one of the selectmen and he says there is something wrong with his computer. If I drive over to his office I will never make it to the seminar. Maybe I should have purchased some remote connectivity software?

Wednesday and Thursday

I need to install Microsoft Office on 450 workstations. What are my options? Should I have purchased a 3rd party utility to deploy it? Do I hire someone to just install it manually or do I spend the rest of the month installing it. I did install it on the Selectmens computer manually and he already had a problem. What do I do now?

I could not wait any longer so I foolishly installed Office 2003 on 100 workstations and still have 150 installations to go. I am getting calls from my Office 2003 users who say that Microsoft Word keeps freezing. I finally find out that Service Pack 2 came out this morning and will fix the problem that I am experiencing. What should I do? There goes my weekend..

Friday

Friday finally…

Because of the issues with the Security Patches I hired someone to configure all of the workstations to now get their security patches from the internet individually. Thank god something worked out this week and now maybe I can go forward instead of putting out these fires. Now my users are calling because the network is coming down to a crawl. Bandwidth???? Working with Macs was never like this…

Late Friday evening a co-worker just called me to ask me why I choose Harvard Community Health for my medical provider. I said how did you know? Well he said Mike, our HR representative, left his workstation unlocked when he went to lunch and your personal record was just staring me in the face.

Wow what a week…