Chapter 14: Managing and Troubleshooting Access to Resources

Overview

The Managing and Troubleshooting Access to Resources objective domain focuses on the skills that you will need to make network resources, such as folders, files, and printers, available to the users on your network. The exam covers four areas relating to these network resources: file and folder permissions and encryption, shared folder access, printer access, and offline file access.

As a desktop support technician (DST), you must understand how to make resources available to users worldwide. You should also know how to protect these resources from unauthorized access by using file encryption, share permissions, and NTFS permissions. Also, some users will need to access a resource that is located on a network server when they are not connected to the corporate network. You should know how to configure offline folders for such situations and understand how to configure synchronization of the user’s files with those files that are stored on the server. You must be able to troubleshoot network access problems that might be caused by incorrectly configured NTFS or shared permissions and know how to make local and network printers available to your users.

The primary reason why a network exists is to share resources. As a DST, most of your work will be either configuring the network resources so that they are easily accessible to authorized users, or troubleshooting the reasons why a network resource is not available to an authorized user. For you to be successful as a DST, you must be able to do both jobs.