## Scalability of Account Administration

The usual method of administering user and group accounts on Windows NT is through the User Manager program. As with most GUI applications, User Manager confronts efficiency issues when dealing with large amounts of data. For example, if you have to add more than 50 users, User Manager requires a lot of keyboard input and mouse clicks to enter all the account data. Adding 1,000 accounts in this manner would be difficult. There are several strategies that can speed up the process. These include using selections, template accounts, and entirely bypassing the GUI.

User Manager does have selection features that allow you to perform operations on large numbers of accounts simultaneously, but the accounts first have to exist to be selected.

Template accounts can also save you time when creating accounts sharing similar attributes. For example, if you are going to be adding a number of accounts with the same group membership, you can create a template account that you can copy to create new accounts with the same attributes. However, you still have to enter unique information for each account, such as the user name.

Fortunately, there are techniques, such as reading account and group information from data files and creating, modifying, or deleting thousands of accounts at a time, that can be executed from the command line to automate account administration. These techniques include using built-in Windows NT commands and Microsoft Windows NT Resource Kit utilities. For example, the net user, net group, net localgroup and net account commands replicate most of the functionality of the User Manager GUI program. The Microsoft Windows NT Resource Kit adduser command creates users and groups read in from a text file. Scripting languages can also be used for mass account creation. For example, by using Perl for Win32, it is possible to enter accounts directly into the registry, bypassing any administrative front-end GUI.

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Last Updated: December 1, 1997