Have you ever needed to create a new user account? Do you need to create an account on all of the computers in your network, but the thought of going to each one to create the account is less than appealing?

This article goes through three user account creation methods that we should all know, and one of which that can use used in Deployment Console. Hopefully after reading this article you should have the resources you need to create user accounts whenever or however you need to.

The Control Panel

The first way to create a user account is pretty straight forward (and everyone probably knows this method, but we should cover it for good measure). The first thing that we need to do is navigate to the Control Panel. There are several ways to do this:

• Go to Start >> Control Panel
• Go to Start >> My Computer
  • Once in My Computer, there should be a Change a Setting or Control Panel link in the left pane. See the image below for a reference.

Click to view.

Once in the Control Panel, make your way toward the icon named "User Accounts."

Click to view.

Click to view.

Once the User Account window opens, it looks like this:

Click to view.

There are several things that you can do to an account through this wonderful GUI.

If you click "Change an account," (and then select an account) you can:

• Change the account name
• Change the account password
• Remove the account password (you probably should not do this)
• Change the account picture
• Change the account type (if you are an administrator, you can make the account an administrator or a limited account)

If you click on "Create a new account," you can:

Create a new account:

• First you need to enter an account name.
• Pick an account type. You can choose to be a "Computer administrator"
  • Note: If you note logged in as an administrator, you, of course, cannot create an administrator account. You can only create an account equal to your own.
• When you are all done, click on "Create Account," and you have brand new account!

For a more visual (step by step) instructions, visit this web site: How to use Windows XP: Creating User Accounts

The concepts and principles involved in the GUI method of creating a user account are very important. These GUI basics lay a foundation for the rest of the article.

Computer Management Window

The first method is pretty simple and straight forward, but it does not give all the options that are needed to create a user account. Creating an account through the Computer Management window allows us create an account, and tweak everything to do with that account.

There are many different ways to get to the Computer Management window, the most common are listed below:

• Right click on My Computer
• Now, go to "Manage"

Click to view.

The Computer Management window will open, and it looks like this:

Once it is open, navigate to Local Users and Groups >> Users. Here is an example below:

Click to view.

Creating a New Account

To create a new account, do the following:

• Right Click in any empty space in the right pane of the Computer Management window
• Click on "New User"

Click to view.

Now, the New User window will open. This window allows you to enter in all of the vital information about a new user. I have provided an example of how I typically fill out this information below (keep in mind that I usually don't use test for everything).

Click to view.

Depending on the situation, different options should be selected. The New User creation options are self explanatory, so select the options that make sense in your situation.

Now if you hit Create, a new account has been created.

Editing an Existing Account

If you want to edit an account, right click on an existing account.

The following window will open:

Click to view.

As you can see, it gives you the User Properties window General looks almost the same as the New User window.

If you go to the "Member Of" tab, you can add the user to groups. To learn more about user groups, please read this article: Guide to User Groups for Windows XP Enthusiasts

If you want to add a user to the administrators user group, please read this article: Add A User Account To The Administrators Group In XP

The Command Prompt

The Command Prompt gives the system admin complete control over user creation. Of course, if you can do it in the command prompt, you can add it into a bat or cmd file. If you can do that, you can automate the entire process. Automation is the key to successfully managing computers. I will talk more about automating this process in the next section. For right now, lets dig into how to create a user account (with all of the trimmings) through the Command Prompt.

First, we need to make our way to the Command Prompt. There are several ways to do that:

• Go to Start >> Accessories >> Command Prompt
• Go to Start >> Run
  • In the text box next to "Open," type "cmd" (without the "quotes")
• Hit the "Windows Key" and "R" at the same time

Now we have the Command Prompt open, we can roll up our sleeves and get to work.

Creating the Account

The command that we will be using for the next few sections is the net command. To learn more about the net command, type "net /?" in the command prompt, and then hit enter.

The sub-command that we will use to create the user is, well, user.

The command looks like this:

net user useraccount /add

Using the script above, you will create an account named "useraccount."

Setting the Password

One of the first things that need to be done to an account is setting the password. An account without a password is a huge security risk. Here is how you set the password for the account that we created above:

net user useraccount temp789

So now, our account (named user account) has a password of temp789

Setting the User Groups

You can also add or delete the user to whatever group you like. By default when an account is created, it belongs to the "Users" group.

To add an account to another group (besides the default Users group), lets say the Administrators group, use the following command:

net localgroup "Administrators" "useraccount" /add

Now our account is a member of the Administrators group.

If you would like to remove the account from a group, lets say the Users group, use the following command:

net localgroup "Administrators" "useraccount" /delete

Other Options

There are tons of other options associated with the net user command. I found this great web site (provided by Microsoft) that goes through each net user option, and explains what they do. Best of all, it provides examples each option. Here is the address: Net user

Deployment Console

Being able to use what we learned in the section above is what makes it so powerful. That is where Deployment Console comes in.

To learn more about creating jobs in Deployment Console, please read pg 413 in the Deployment Solution Reference Guide.

On pg 416 of the Reference Guide, it talks about what different types of deployment tasks you can create in Deployment Console. You will want to create a "Run Script" deployment task. To learn more about the "Run Script" deployment task, please read on pg 428. You should be able to use all of the command line scripting we talked about above in a Run Script task.

The Problem

This may not be a problem for some of you, but it was a really big problem for me. After I had figured out how to create a user account through Deployment Console I was really happy. Once I created the account I logged in. I saw that Windows did a number of things once you logged in.

In fact, the account only shows up in Document and Settings once you log in. This was a problem for me because I wanted the account to look and feel a certain way.

I was able to find a solution to this little snag I hit, but it requires its own article (that should be coming in the near future).

So, if you are satisfied with the default account settings, you are good to go!