Problem mapping drives

[Justin_NH]

Hullo everyone!

I'm admin of a relatively small and, in my opinion, inefficiently organized network(My first IT job btw). It's also a radio station and since I started about 3 weeks ago, I've been receiving complaints from the staff about how much of a pain it is to share their files. Currently, people are basically emailing their files they want to share back and forth. I find this very inefficient considering everyone's in the office. So my solution was to create a shared directory on one of our servers and have in it a bunch of sub-directories for each staff member. Here, everyone will have full access to each others folders. Of course I'm warning them not to put sensitive material in any of the folders as they will be shared amongst everyone.

Now my plan was to map a drive to the top directory on all the workstations through out the office. The problem I'm running into though is that when I map a drive, it's only good for that individual user on that specific workstation. The mapping doesn't follow the user from workstation to workstation. Is there anyway I can map the drive on each workstation and have it appear regardless of who the user is? I know little about batch files and even less about a batch file that would do what I need but from what I understand this would be a possible solution.

We have about 8 salses staff sharing 5 workstations throughout the office. What I want is for any one of them to be able to sit down at any of the computers and have access to the same mapped drive. But right now, if say one of them is sitting down to a specific computer and I map a drive to that share for them, that user can only access it if they're sitting down at that specific computer. And when the next user comes along to that machine and logs into they're account, I need to map the same thing again.
Hope this makes sense.
Thanks.

 

[root]

firstly, are the servers/workstations networked in a domain, or are they just in a workgroup?

if they are in a domain, use domain wide a login script. the location of these is set in the active directory users and computers console...

if not...
you can either just put a script on the desktop for people to click to map drives, map the drive for each user and select to reconnect at logon
if they are not on a domain I don't think you can use logon scripts, but it's something you could investigate...

Secondly, having access to each others files, obviously not ideal... so I'll tell you how to restrict that...

we'll call that main folder users
this is the folder that is shared, right click on this file and select sharing, share the file, and in the permissions part of the sharing dislogue make sure that everybody has share permissions to the folder...

now click on the security tab and make sure that everybody has access to the folder as well...

now go to the sub folders inside of the users share and right click on the users folder. go to the security tab, now deselect inherrit permissions from parent.
(this means that the group everyone is taken away from the people with acess to the folder), now add the user whose home directory this will be.
add an administrative user, and a backup user to the people allowed to access the folder, no nobody except the user can access their files and they can store whatever they like.

just as an example here is the logon script you'll need if you are in a domain.

Set WSHNetwork = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Network")
strUser = WSHNetwork.UserName
WSHNetwork.MapNetworkDrive "H:", "\\fileserver\users\" & strUser,True

(it's vbscript)

 

[neil_kct]

the very simplest way to do this is create a new text file and type "net use x:\\server\shared folder persistent:yes" and save it as map.bat or something similar. copy it to the c:\documents and settings\all users\start menu\programs\start up folder and it will run at each users logon.