Active Directory, 3rd Edition

Customizing the Active Directory Administrative Snap-ins

For those who have worked with Windows NT domains, you are undoubtedly familiar with two GUI tools: User Manager (usrmgr.exe) and Server Manager (srvmgr.exe). User Manager allows administrators to manipulate the properties of users and groups, while Server Manager can manipulate computer accounts. In Active Directory, a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in called Active Directory Users and Computers (ADUC) has taken the place of both these tools.

While ADUC is built primarily to manage users, groups, and computers as the previous User Manager and Server Manager did, you can actually use it to manage nearly any type of object within a Domain Naming Context. You can create an entire hierarchy of Organizational Units, user accounts, computer accounts, groups, printers, and so on and manage them with ADUC. The tool, however, is limited in what it provides "out of the box." While ADUC can display a lot of attributes for objects, you cannot view every attribute, as you can with ADSIEdit. Figure 27-3 shows the various groupings of attributes (e.g., Organization) that can be viewed by clicking the appropriate tab. Each tab represents a property page, which contains a logical grouping of attributes to display.

Now compare Figure 27-3 with Figure 27-4, which shows the property pages for a computer object.

Figure 27-4 contains considerably fewer property pages. A computer object inherits from the user class and contains ...