| Configuration Management, Security Management & Compliance Management |
| Password Reset Solution: Account Reset Console |
| Transparent Automatic User Password Synchronization between Servers/Domains |
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Customer Name: Tarrant County College
Products Used: User Manager Pro, Random Password Generator (UMP Add-on), Service Account Manager and Task Scheduler Pro
Problem Definition
Managing workstations for Tarrant County College is an exceptionally difficult task. Allow us to paint the picture:
Chad Harris, Manager of Networks and Hardware for Tarrant County College, has a taxing checklist that requires hourly, daily, weekly…attention from him and his team. At any given time, he needs to be able to give an approving nod to the following questions:
- Have the local administrator passwords been changed on all workstations?
- Have the registry values and permissions been changed on all workstations?
- Are all changes documented and securely stored?
- Is the domain free of dead accounts?
For most administrators, Chad’s taxing checklist is far from exceptional and falls more into the “preaching to the choir” category. However, Chad must adhere to a reality that most administrators don’t: as part of a school district, his machine accounts change every 9 months. Chad explains, “The churn in computer accounts comes from the frequent re-imaging and re-building of classroom and lab computers to prepare them for the next semester class or to fix errors for which troubleshooting would take too long.” Thus, while most administrators can expect to clean out a handful of dead machine accounts annually, Chad is faced with hundreds to thousands.
Problem resolution
With that many accounts changing on that frequent a basis, Chad would need nothing short of the aid of a detective to make sure his workstations were only accessible by the permitted users. Lucky for Chad, User Manager Pro makes it painless to cover these bases, as he notes, “We use User Manager Pro largely for investigations. We may be interested in event logs in a variety of machines or to investigate tombstone computer accounts in our domain. Whatever the case, User Manager Pro diligently pulls the information for us and makes the changes when and where applicable.”
Over the past 5 years of his ownership, Chad has found new ways to tackle other tedious situations by utilizing User Manager Pro.
"This is a school, so we have labs and classrooms that may be used for a particular purpose. User Manager Pro provides a convenient way to set permissions and accounts in a small subset where it’s intended to be for an hour or two. We may also put particular accounts in the local administrator group for a couple hours so that the teacher is able to perform functions during that period and nothing more."
Lieberman Software provides a diverse selection of tools. As an owner of three tools, Chad finds that the one quality that links them all together is convenience:
"I’ve thought about what these past 5 years would have been like without Lieberman Software's tools. Needless to say, without the tools, it would be very inconvenient to run reports and maintain an efficient auditing system. I find User Manager Pro, for example, to be the handiest tool. It’s really a question of convenience. When I need to change the local administrator account or registry values, I employ User Manager Pro. When I need to make sure that the correct services are running, I use Service Account Manager. When I need to manage tasks, I use Task Scheduler Pro."
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