Security Explorer Problems-and-Solutions

Problem
- An administrator wanted to get a report of security on files, folders and file shares for some of their file servers for archival purposes. He did not know anything about scripting or creating reports.

Solution
- The administrator used the export feature in Security Explorer to export security descriptors to a provided Microsoft Access database with a built-in report for NTFS permissions. They did the same for file shares. This provided them with a simple and complete report.

Problem
- An administrator wanted to find out where certain users and groups had access to files and folder in real-time. He was accustomed to the search features in Novell that provided a search through security for access feature - but knew that no such feature existed in Windows.

Solution
- The administrator found that the search function in Security Explorer was very similar to the Novell feature. It allowed them to specify a group or user and even where and what rights to search for. It returned the results in an easily readable and exportable format.

Problem
- An administrator liked the features he saw in Security Explorer, but had an extremely large environment that required a lot of time to manage. Making changes to multiple servers would take hours or days and might not be consistent.

Solution
- Once the administrator found out about Enterprise Scopes she was sold. The Enterprise Scopes allowed her to logically group volumes, folders, files, file shares and registry keys together to be managed as a single logical unit. She was able to add security to user home directories on several servers at one time. She eventually created several scopes to encompass all of their management functions.

Problem
- The marketing department of a company was working on a complex project with access to many different folders across many project servers. They hired a temp to work with them on this project. Normally the temp would just be added to the Marketing group and get the same access as everyone else, but in this case they did not want them to have access to information they had on other servers.

Solution
- Instead of manually granting access to the very large amount of folders that the temp needed, the administrator used the clone feature in Security Explorer and cloned the security for the Marketing group to the new temp across the project server they needed access to. This gave the temp the same security on the same folders as everyone in the Marketing group - but without providing unnecessary rights elsewhere.

Problem
- An administrator wanted a way to easily prevent security from being damaged by other administrators. In the past a junior administrator had tried to add security for the Domain Admins to the root of a volume containing user home directories. This over-wrote the security on the users?

Problem
- An administrator had just come to a new company and wanted to enforce a policy of a standard group and user naming convention. The built-in tools in Windows Server did not allow them to do this effectively.

Solution
- They had purchased Security Explorer recently and discovered that the ability to rename accounts and groups was part of the software. They were able to rename groups and accounts across their domain from a single workstation to make them all consistent.