There are far too many administrators who must work the week of Christmas. They are there to ensure that the network is running and the company is still making money. In times like these, it gets boring in the office. So, I figured I would give you a task. The task is to find all of the users that have non-expiring passwords! Now, this might seem like an easy task, but in reality, it’s not. For those of you that already have a “tool” to find non-expiring passwords, work with me on this!
Here are the guidelines of the task:
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Get a listing of all users, enabled and disabled, where the password never expires.
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Get the list in a document (PDF, XLS, CVS, etc.), so it is not just on the screen.
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Keep track of the time it takes to perform each option below (from research, download, and install).
First, do this task with Powershell. I don’t mind: go ahead and use the Internet to get the commands and such. For those of you who have robust Powershell experience, this should be a slam dunk. For those of you who have not dealt with Powershell or only done a few tasks, this might not be as easy as you think.
Second, I would like you to do the same task using ADManager Plus from ManageEngine. To be fair, I will let you figure out how to get the bits for the install. (You can use the ADManager Plus Standard or Professional version free for 30 days, so no need to worry this function will not work.)
Don’t read on until you have done this yourself.
I tried these exact tasks, which led me to come up with the challenge. Here are my comments on what I experienced:
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I realized I needed to download and install the Active Directory Module for Powershell.
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After installing the AD Module, I then needed to find the command.
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After finding the command, I needed to find the correct switch to get the information.
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After finding the switch, I needed to filter the results, as the results were quite ugly.
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Finally, after I got the results on the screen, I needed to figure out how to get the information into a document for saving, printing, sharing, etc.
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It took me seconds to find and download the ADManager Plus tool.
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It took me little time to install ADManager Plus.
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After installation of ADManager Plus, it took me about 30 seconds to find the report I wanted.
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The report did not require any formatting, only me pressing the “export as PDF” option.
In the end, the Powershell option took me about an hour from start to finish. The ADManager Plus solution took me about 10 minutes. Your mileage may vary!
