Configure MultiPoint Server User Accounts

How you configure MultiPoint Server user accounts depends on the complexity of your system. If you have a small system with only a few computers that are running MultiPoint Server and few user accounts, you may find it most convenient to implement local user accounts. If you decide to implement local user accounts, you will have to determine whether to create individual accounts for each person using the system, or whether to create a generic account for each station that anyone can use to log on. In contrast, if your environment has many computers that are running MultiPoint Server and many user accounts, setting up a Windows Server domain and implementing domain user accounts will be more useful.

Individual local user accounts

When creating local user accounts, you have the option of assigning each student to a particular server and creating a single account for each student. Alternatively, you might want to create individual accounts for each student on every available server. A key advantage of implementing individual user accounts for MultiPoint Server is that each user will have his or her own Windows desktop experience that includes private folders for storing data. There are two approaches to creating individual local user accounts with MultiPoint Server: assign each user to a specific MultiPoint Server, and then create an individual account for each user only on the MultiPoint Server to which they have been assigned; or, create local user accounts for all users on every MultiPoint Server.

From a system management perspective, assigning users to a specific MultiPoint Server might be more convenient. For example, presuming you have two MultiPoint Servers with five stations each, you might create local user accounts as illustrated in the following table.

Table 3: Assigning local user accounts to specific MultiPoint Servers

In the previous scenario, each user has a single account on a particular server. Therefore, everyone who has a local account on Server A can log on to her or his account from any station that is associated with Server A. However, these users cannot access their accounts if they use a station associated with Server B, and vice versa. An advantage to this approach is that, by always connecting to the same server, users will always be able to find and access their files.

In contrast, it is also possible to replicate individual user accounts on all computers that are running MultiPoint Server, as illustrated in the following table.

Table 4: Replicating user accounts on all MultiPoint Servers

An advantage of taking the previous approach is that users have a local user account on every available MultiPoint Server. However, the disadvantages might outweigh this advantage. For example, even if the user name and password for a particular person is the same on both MultiPoint Servers, the accounts are not connected to each other. Therefore, if a user logs on to his or her account on Server A on Monday, saves a file, and then logs on to his or her account on Server B on Tuesday, he or she will not be able to access the file previously saved on Server A. Additionally, replicating user accounts on multiple computers increases the administrative overhead and storage requirements.

Generic local user accounts

If your MultiPoint Server system is not connected to a domain, and you do not want to create an individual account for each user, you can create generic accounts for each station instead. For example, if you have two computers that are running MultiPoint Server, and five stations associated with each, you might decide to create user accounts similar to those shown in the following table.

Table 5: Creating generic user accounts

In this scenario, every station account would have the same password, and both the passwords and generic user account names would be available to all users. An advantage to this approach is that the overhead of managing user accounts is likely to be less than if using individual accounts, because there will probably be fewer stations than there are users. Additionally, the overhead caused by replicating user accounts on every server will also be eliminated. However, this scenario presents its own disadvantages. For example, if you create a single account for Server_A-Station_01 that anyone can use, you can log on to that station and create individual folders for everyone who will use that station. The disadvantage to this approach is that anyone who logs on to that station will have access to all of the individual user folders that are associated with the Server_A-Station_01 user ID, regardless of whose files they are. Also, if users log on to a different station each day—even if the stations are all associated with the same MultiPoint Server—they will not be able to access any of the files that were created on a different station.