Active Directory, Second Edition

Writing and Running Scripts

The third part of this book is dedicated to showing you techniques to access and manipulate Active Directory programmatically. It not only contains a plethora of useful scripts that you will be able to adapt for use in your organization, but it also contains a lot of information on how you can write your own scripts to access Active Directory to do whatever you need. Let’s take a quick look at how to get started writing and running scripts.

A Brief Primer on COM and WSH

Since the release of Windows 2000, each operating system Microsoft has produced comes with a technology called the Windows Scripting Host, more commonly known as WSH, which allows scripts to execute directly on the client. WSH-based scripts can open and read files, attach to network resources, automate Word and Excel to create reports and graphs, automate Outlook to manipulate email and news, change values in the registry, and so on. The reason these scripts can be so versatile is that WSH supports scripting access to all Component Object Model (COM) objects installed on the client.

COM is a Microsoft technology that allows programmers to automate and manipulate virtually anything you require on a host by defining each host component as a set of objects. When someone needs to create or manage a new component on a Windows-based host, she creates a COM interface, which can be thought of as the definition of the object and the entire set of operations that can be performed on that object. ...