It's quite surprising to know that the system administrator are not able to view the history of the user's activity on the domain's resource effectively and easily. The administrators has to take several beaten path and weave it's way full of confusing settings and configurations before it's able to see the information it wanted, after filtering from the lots of useless information from the pool resulted from those settings and configurations.
I've been looking for a solution on this matter after the HOD of OSSD Department aka "My Lady Boss" asked me to do so. Using a Windows Server 2003 built from Virtual Machine 2007, I discovered that getting such information wasn't easy, or inaccessible to laymen. Scouring the internet made me understand that more than half of the world's System Administrators are looking for solutions on this matter, as early as 2004. Basically, I've no access
Why??
With the capability of being a Domain Controller of a massive network configuration, Windows Server 2003 (various edition) should be able to have various tools to made the System Administrator's life easy, enable them to access to information easily. But then, somehow, they decided to made it hard, as thou life is easy as it seems. I just couldn't understand why. Is that so hard to track activities on the Active Directory or the share resources the server has rolled out?
I just can't fathom the mind of those brilliant developers in Microsoft. They took assumptions that life are supposed to be so... err.... have they been in the shoes of System Administrators prior to their attachments in Microsoft, I asked myself sometime, every time I hit a bug in the system. Life as a System Admin aren't easy, they have to cope with the temperament machines who would just black out out of no reason, and those users who just loved to mess with those settings we meted out for their benefits. Above all, those outside factors, vendors, customers, business partners etc.
Anyway, enough of my rant, through the span of days of scouring the net for answers and solutions, I've seen scripts, utilities and various third party software, which some would work perfectly but most wouldn't. This is because our network environment are somewhat different from other typical Domain setup. We used more of workgroups and only logged on to the Domain to share the network resource aka Shared Folders, Shared Printers. Therefore, the users and workstation don't really log on to the Active Directory in the Domain Controller locally, rather through the network resource. So until now, I've nothing to reply to my boss and I'm getting quite anxious already.
For anyone who do have any idea or solutions for my scenario above, I truly appreciates your kindness to share with me.
Back to the net, hopefully for a solution...
Cheers
Andy 'Shackks' Ooi
