The migration to Active Directory is not just for the single-user computers of faculty and staff, but also for our lab and classroom computers that have many users.
All our AD computers, including computers assigned to a specific person, can support multiple users – a different user can log on. The distinction here is, a computer that is intended to be used primarily by one person is a “single-user” computer (even if occasionally used by others); while a computer that is intended to be used by multiple users, as in a lab or classroom, would be considered a “multi-user” computer.
There are certain differences in the details; most of these differences are not obvious to the user, but relate to how the computer handles multiple users behind the scenes.
However, because the technical details are different, we will be addressing the multi-user computers separately from single-user computers. We started deploying multi-user AD computers in late 2021, but the majority of our multi-user computers will be migrated just before the Fall 2022 semester.
IMPORTANT NOTE: The migration of computer lab computers to AD will CHANGE certain aspects of how these computers work (as compared with the non-AD environment). Users will have to be aware of these changes to be successful with the new environment. Check here for updates in August 2022.