I was just wondering if anyone has used or documented the use of the Windows Powershell Connector for creating/moving/deleting users' home directories on remote fileservers? I have been unable to find any examples myself. 

I have a couple of up-coming FIM jobs which will require some home directory automation and I'm currently determining whether the PSMA or Windows PS Connector would better suit my needs. 

Any advice re/my question or home directory management with FIM in general would be much appreciated. 

• Edited by FIM-EN Tuesday, June 10, 2014 8:45 AM

We have done a couple of projects with HomeDirectory. We use Soren's Powershell MA for it.

Is there any specific question you would like to ask? I cannot share documentation with you, as each documentation is customer-specific as well as the sol

Hi Dominik, thanks for the reply.

Well the plan so far in the more complex scenario is to:

Import users from SQL, stick them in the portal, provision to AD with a calculated home directory (based on department and initials), users with AD accounts provisioned may then have their home directories created and permissions applied. It is possible user departments will change. Users will enter an expired state after their expiry date passes and enter a 'deleted' state some time after that, this'll be done with temporal sets.

Things which are concerning me:

- What happens if the directory changes. Is moving folders a possibility? It'd be nice to allow the directory to be moved from one server to another if the user's department changes but what if, for example, the folder is in use? 

- Users will be put in an 'expired' state after their expiry date then, after so many months of being expired they'll be deleted. The folder can be renamed to "expired_<accountName>" and then be deleted, but again, what if directory is in use?

Really I'm just after and tips or advice that those with more experience in this area may have for me. Does the above scenario solution seem reasonable to you? Would you suggest a different approach?

Following today's research I think am more likely to use Soren's PSMA owing to more suitable example scripts being available, I'm going to give that a gov in my test environment. 

Thanks

• Edited by FIM-EN Tuesday, June 10, 2014 12:03 PM

I'm using my own PSMA for a lot of Home Folder management setup's with different approaches to renaming and such. Common for all cases are the following  -

1) Path is calculated in the FIM portal or similar (and recalculated when user is disabled / should move or similar)

2) My PSMA imports users from AD and only joins to existing users. Export flows for the MA are typically a value to homeDrive and homeDirectory. The PSMA only writes / clears the values in AD when a directory create, move or delete is successfully done - otherwise not. This means that export will get called again and again on failure since FIM Sync will retry the export if not imported correctly. This means that you can rely on FIM to call you scripts again if you canot move or delete folders that are in use.

You can download the sample scripts on my blog and examine them for more details (http://blog.goverco.com/p/psmadownloads.html) - get my version if you want to go with the approach above. Also, you could watch the introduction video where I explain this scenario briefly - http://blog.goverco.com/p/powershell-management-agent.html

Thanks.