Wizards mischief

A warning regarding the SBS User Roles and Change User role wizard.

I really like the concept of the User Role in SBS, it reminds me of the organisational role in Novell eDirectory. The real advantage here is you can assign a user a role, and the quotas, permissions and group memberships are automatically applied to that user. Need to make a site wide change to a group of users, simply change the role and these are reapplied to the users assigned that role. Easy.

However, I have been dealing with a number of migrations lately. This is where the user roles can become problematic. When migrating users to SBS 2008, the change user role wizard will safely add the settings for the role and assign it to the selected users. However, when making changes to the role, applying the changes will remove that user from any other groups they had membership of.

Bugger. My simple piece of advise, never change a user role in SBS. If a change is required, create a new role based on the original and use the change user role wizard.

Aother blog post on this subject here

SBS Blog here

Technet article here