In any industry big or small, you need to manage many users. Now as a system admin, you can manage each user individually by selecting a user, giving him permissions and doing this procedure to all the remaining users. You can do this, but to a limited number of users.
What if your company has over 500 users or say 1000 users. Giving same permissions to multiple users manually will take ages.
This is where a group comes into picture. You can add 100 users to a group and set the permissions on it. By this you can assign permissions to 100 users in one click. You can also make multiple groups, add all users in them accordingly and then set permissions. Doing this saves time and hours of work. Even if you have to apply permission to one user, make a group and add the user and then apply permission to the GROUP. In this way, later if the number of users of that group increase, you don’t have to assign permissions to them, just add them to the existing group of one user and they will automatically get the permission.
So lets check out how to add users to group and creating and administering groups in Windows Server 2012:
- In Server manager go to Tools –> Active Directory Users and Computers.
Go to tools–>Active directory users and computers
- Go to users. Here you’ll see a list of users that are present in the server.
Click on users
- We have to add an existing user to a group. So choose the group –> Right click –> Properties. We will be adding a user to ‘DHCP Administrators’ group
Right-click on group you want to add the users in and select properties.
- Click on ‘Members’ tab. Since we haven’t added any members it will be blank.
In properties click on Members tab
Click on Add Button
Enter the name of the user in text box and click on ‘Check Names’.add–>enter name and click on check names
The server will then check if that user exists, and if he does, it will directly take its name. Click on Ok.
Server will automatically select the user
You can now see your user under the ‘Members’ tab. Click on Ok.
Check if you can see user in members tab
- If you want to verify again, you can go to the user’s properties (Testing User in this case) and click on ‘Member Of’ tab. It will list all the groups that particular user is a member of.
Properties of user we just added
In the above steps you saw how to add a user to an existing group. But what if you want to add user to your own group. Here are the steps to create your own group:
- Select Users –> Right-click –> New –> Group.
create a new group. Right-click on users–>new–>group.
- Add the group name. Don’t worry about the next text box. Select the ‘Group Scope’ as ‘Global’ and ‘Group Type; as ‘Security’.
Enter name, keep scope as global.
- You can also add a group as a member of another group. Select the group to which you want to add the new group (DHCP Administrators in this case), Right-click –> Properties. Select the ‘Members’ tab. Enter the group’s name (Test Group in this case) and click on ‘Check Names’. Since we already have testing user, it will ask you which member you want to add in the group? Select ‘Test Group’ and click on Ok.
add member, enter group’s name, click on check names.
- Right Click on the new group you created (Test Group) and check if its a Member of the group we added it in. Right-click –> Properties and ‘Members Of’ tab.
Check new group’s properties.
