Managing Group Membership

After you've created a group, you can add members to it. As mentioned earlier, you can put the same user in multiple groups. You can easily add and remove users through a group's Properties dialog box. To access this dialog box from the Groups folder in the Local Users and Groups utility, double-click the group you want to manage.

From the group's Properties dialog box, you can change the group's description and add or remove group members. When you click the Add button to add members, the Select Users dialog box appears.

In the Select Users dialog box, enter the object names of the users you want to add. You can use the Check Names button to validate the users against the database. Select the user accounts you want to add and click Add. Click OK to add the selected users to the group.

Special Groups

Although the special groups that were covered earlier in the tutorial are listed in this dialog box, you cannot manage the membership of these special groups.

To remove a member from the group, select the member in the Members list of the Properties dialog box and click the Remove button.

Perform the following steps to create new user accounts and then add these users to one of the groups you created in the previous steps:

1. Open the Admin Console MMC shortcut you created and expand the Local Users and Groups snap-in.
2. Create two new users: JDoe and DDoe. Deselect the User Must Change Password At Next Logon option for each user.
3. Expand the Groups folder.
4. Double-click the Data Users group.
5. In the Data Users Properties dialog box, click the Add button.
6. In the Select Users dialog box, type the username JDoe, then click OK. Click Add and type the username DDoe, then click OK.
7. In the Data Users Properties dialog box, you will see that the users have all been added to the group. Click OK to close the group's Properties dialog box.

Another task that might need to be completed is changing the name of a group, and we discuss this in the next section.