User rights
Applies To: Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2003 with SP1, Windows Server 2003 with SP2
User rights
Administrators can assign specific rights to group accounts or to individual user accounts. These rights authorize users to perform specific actions, such as logging on to a system interactively or backing up files and directories. User rights are different from permissions because user rights apply to user accounts, and permissions are attached to objects. For information on permissions, see How inheritance affects file and folder permissions.
User rights define capabilities at the local level. Although user rights can apply to individual user accounts, user rights are best administered on a group account basis. This ensures that a user logging on as a member of a group automatically inherits the rights associated with that group. By assigning user rights to groups rather than individual users, you simplify the task of user account administration. When users in a group all require the same user rights, you can assign the set of user rights once to the group, rather than repeatedly assigning the same set of user rights to each individual user account.
User rights that are assigned to a group are applied to all members of the group while they remain members. If a user is a member of multiple groups, the user's rights are cumulative, which means that the user has more than one set of rights. The only time that rights assigned to one group might conflict with those assigned to another is in the case of certain logon rights. In general user rights assigned to one group do not conflict with the rights assigned to another group. To remove rights from a user, the administrator simply removes the user from the group. In this case, the user no longer has the rights assigned to that group.
There are two types of user rights: privileges, such as the right to back up files and directories, and logon rights, such as the right to log on to a system locally.
For more information, see Privileges, Logon rights and Security Configuration Manager tools.