Microsoft® Windows® Scripting Self-Paced Learning Guide

Searching for Specific Types of Objects

One of the best ways to improve the performance of Active Directory searches is to limit the scope of the search operation. Fortunately, searching for a specific type of object is one of the easiest tasks to perform. For example, to perform a task on a group of computers, limit your search to the computer class of objects. To work with only groups, users, computers, or printers, specify the objectClass or the objectCategory in the search filter. The objectCategory attribute is a single value that specifies the class from which the object in Active Directory is derived. In other words, users are derived from an objectCategory called users. All the properties you looked at in the last chapter are contained ...