Why you want (and need) to run USMT as a local administrator

re: Why you want (and need) to run USMT as a local administrator

dgibson3 — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 17:28:32 GMT

That's a terrible solution. We tried using a similar work around at our company. By the way, we wouldn't dream of making all domain users admin on a box (even temporarily).

One of the problems we had is that we have clients in 13 different languages. Vista internationalizes the names of the local groups.

So on a non-English client, before you type in the "simple" solution in this article, you have to write more code to find out the actual name of the "administrators" group on the PC.

I think a better solution would be for Microsoft to fix the bug.

Why you want (and need) to run USMT from an account directly associated with the local administrators group

The USMT team blog — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 03:18:20 GMT

UPDATE: a post regarding this topic originally went live on 5/29/2008.  This was written to clarify

re: Why you want (and need) to run USMT as a local administrator

tdolan — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 03:25:35 GMT

@dgibson3

Thanks for your constructive feedback on this post. Although this doesn’t resolve the need for a workaround, I have updated the blog post (see the link at the top) to more accurately describe the bug as well as the effort that must go into implementing a scalable work around.

It’s great to hear that you wouldn’t dream of making all domain users and admin on a box, even temporarily. I certainly wasn’t trying to suggest that (and I hope that my update to the post makes that clear).

re: Why you want (and need) to run USMT as a local administrator

developerInSF — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 23:35:03 GMT

Making users a local admin for the sake of an application is always a terrible idea; especially for organizations that use enterprise management systems. The purpose of removing admin rights from the user is to protect them from malware. The only time someone should stay in the local admin group is if their job function requires it. And USMT doesn't make that requirement.

Is there any way to leverage SMS so that the user could compliment the migration process? I'm thinking the user starts the migration and retrieves their own information and when necessary, use SMS to gather the system settings on the user's behalf.