Active Directory, Second Edition

Real-World Examples

It now seems appropriate to put what we have laid out earlier into practice. We will use a series of tasks that could crop up during your everyday work as an administrator. The solutions we propose probably are not the only solutions to the problems. That is often the case with Active Directory; there are many ways of solving the same problem.

Hiding Specific Personal Details for All Users in an Organizational Unit from a Group

In this example, an Organizational Unit called Hardware Support Staff contains the user accounts of an in-house team of people whose job is to repair and fix broken computers within your organization. Whenever a user has a fault, he rings the central faults hotline to request a support engineer. An engineer is assigned the job, which is added to the end of her existing list of faults to deal with. The user is informed about which engineer will be calling and approximately when she will arrive. As with all jobs of this sort, some take longer than others, and users have discovered how to find the mobile or pager number of the engineer they have been assigned and have taken to calling her to get an arrival time update rather than ringing the central desk. Management has decided that they want to restrict who can ring the pager or mobile, but they do not want to stop giving out the engineer’s name as they feel it is part of the friendly service. Consequently, they have asked you to find a way of hiding the pager and mobile numbers in Active ...