Are you an Administrator tired of manually creating folder structures for new projects? Then DirCreator is just what you need. DirCreator is an enterprise-proven tool to automatically generate structured, template-based directory structures, along with groups, members and ACLs.
You can either create a template from scratch or create a template based on an existing folder structure. For this demonstration I first create a template folder structure on my home lab data share.
\\server01\data\Projects
I also modify the folders permissions
Next I run DirCreator with the following command line:
C:\data\dircreator>DirCreator.exe ReadAcls -d \\server01\data\Projects -r true – x c:\data\template.xml
This generates the template file template.xml
As a next step, I’ll replace the folder name “Template”
With $!{DirectoryName}
And then save the template.xml. To create a new Project folder called FooProject1 that contains all predefined sub folders, group members and ACL’s, I run the following command:
C:\data\dircreator>DirCreator.exe -t c:\data\template.xml -n "DirectoryName=FooProject1"
And see, a new Project folder is created, containing all predefined subfolders and folder permissions.
In this example I only used static AD group names, but if you have a little bit of time, you can customize DirCreator to automatically create project specific groups for you.
DirCreator can be used as a standalone command line tool or as a Windows Service where it will automatically process *.job.xml files once stored in the defined directory.
More information about DirCreator and download links can be found here