THE INFORMATION IN THIS ARTICLE APPLIES TO:
QUESTION
If you have selected the Auto assign home folders to newly created users check box for an AD-authenticated Site, what happens to the account? Since the user has a home folder already defined in AD, why does it give you an option to create a home folder?
ANSWER
When the Auto assign home folders to newly created users check box is selected, each user account that is created will have a home folder added as a subfolder of the home folder for the User Setting Level to which the user is added.
For example, if you add a user "jsmith" to the User Setting Level "Power Users," and that User Setting Level's home folder has a path of "/Usr/Power Users/" in the VFS, then this new "jsmith" account will be generated with a home folder in the EFT VFS of "/Usr/Power Users/jsmith".
This is the default behavior when creating a user within EFT Server. You can override/change that behavior when the Site is created; however, if the user is created using the COM interface, or the user appears in the EFT Server list as a result of Active Directory, LDAP, or ODBC querying the user account list in real-time and finding out that it IS a valid user but not yet added to EFT Server, then a home folder is added as a subfolder of the home folder for the User Setting Level to which the user is added.
For Sites that use NTLM/AD authentication, if the user account has a "Home Folder" defined by the AD administrator, then the VFS will not create a physical folder for the new user, but instead will create a virtual folder that points to the path specified in Active Directory for the home folder for that user (sometimes called a "roaming profile"). Therefore, if "jsmith" exists on the AD controller as a valid user with a home folder mapped to \\192.168.20.19\common_file_share\jsmith, then when "jsmith" becomes a new user on EFT Server (using the same pathing/User Setting Level from the above example), then "jsmith" will be assigned the home folder "/usr/Power Users/jsmith" which is a virtual folder pointing to \\192.168.20.19\common_file_share\jsmith.