Advice on one time credential capture and usage

[Greenbeast]

Trying to make my life easier supporting user laptops in a school.

I'd like to present a text box when the user logs in for the first time.

They would enter their password and the script would toddle off and change their windows password to the one typed, i'd also like to add credentials for the webproxy (but i don't know if these are stored in the registry) and i'd like to configure a exchange (2003) mail account for outlook 2007.

How much of this is possible and where is a good place to start?

I tried looking for an example script to start me off, something that accepts some text and does something with it, but the example names don't make it obvious.

Many thanks

[JohnOne]

Quick question? would this not give you access to every password in the school?

[Greenbeast]

Well given that i'm the system admin, that doesn't really matter too much.

Anyway, i didn't want the script to store the password for any length of time, i only want the script to run once, on first login.

If the password is stored in a variable rather than a file somewhere then it's not avaiable after the script has run is it?

I wouldn't really want the password to be laying about on thge drive somewhere anyhow.

Thanks

[JohnOne]

I dont think an administartor worth their salt would ask a user to enter their password into a GUI, to do with as they please.

Pehaps you could invoke the password change screen with wmi or something, and let them enter it there, themselves.

Edited July 14, 2011 by JohnOne

[sleepydvdr]

When you create the student's account, you should leave a check box in the field "User must change password at next logon". Wouldn't that do what you want?

[Greenbeast]

I dont think an administartor worth their salt would ask a user to enter their password into a GUI, to do with as they please.

Pehaps you could invoke the password change screen with wmi or something, and let them enter it there, themselves.

Well i'm just trying to automate some tedious tasks. I currently have to babysit through mail profile creation and first entry of proxy credentials, plus setting their win password to match their domain password... i'd kinda just like to create a named account and hand it over.

Yes that would solve one part of the problem, perhaps i could couple that with some form of pre-configure of outlook (which i'm also investigating)

Not sure about the poroxy credentials though, can they be set in registry?

When you create the student's account, you should leave a check box in the field "User must change password at next logon". Wouldn't that do what you want?

partly yes

[water]

If your users are managed in an Active Directory then you can use my AD UDF (for download please see my signature).

It has functions to change a users password and to force the user to change the password at next logon. It has another function to create a mailbox (as long as you are on Exchange 2003).

[Greenbeast]

well they are in AD, but these laptops are non-domain.

that's another avenue i'm investigating