Active Directory, Second Edition

Part III. Scripting Active Directory with ADSI, ADO, and WMI

In the networks of today, companies can have tens of thousands of users on hundreds of servers in an organization that spans many sites. Managing complex systems can take a lot of time, and setting up the mechanisms to effect sensible management can be cumbersome.

Windows Server 2003 and Windows 2000 provide the administrator with a variety of tools to manage Active Directory. Unfortunately, these tools are no help for a variety of tasks that you may need to do en masse. No one in his right mind creates thousands of user accounts using the Active Directory Users and Computers snap-in. You can also manage and manipulate the Active Directory objects using scripts—and very powerful scripts at that. You can write scripts to manipulate any object and its properties, and you can port these scripts to the web, allowing administration through a browser interface.

Before we start, we want to state categorically that scripting Active Directory is easy. You don’t have to know complex code algorithms, pointer structures, object class inheritance, or any of the weird world of complex program languages. Here we use Microsoft’s VBScript language, a very simple language both to use and to understand. You should have no problem coming to this section with zero knowledge and being able to understand and implement the concepts behind the chapters in the section.

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter ...