Active Directory (AD) administrators have always had to come up with unique ways of finding objects in Active Directory. I am not talking about the “Find” option that is available from Active Directory Users and Computers (ADUC). Rather, digging through thousands of users, groups, and computers to find objects that meet specific characteristics. Here are examples of some search criteria that is typically difficult to find:
“All of the users in the HR OU that haven’t changed their passwords in more than 360 days and haven’t logged on in over 180 days.”
“All of the users in the Administrators group, but not in the ‘IT Admins’ OU. They must also have a password that hasn’t been changed in the past 180 days.”
As you can imagine, trying to use ADUC to find the results of these queries would be difficult, and that’s without considering additional attributes such as manager, country, department, and even custom attributes. The solution to this is to use a tool that is designed to perform these complex queries—ADManager Plus. Figure 1 illustrates how easy it can be to create a query in ADManager Plus to find objects in AD.
Figure 1. Custom ADManager Plus query to find objects in AD.
Finding objects is important, but often you might want to see other attributes of the object as well, without having to go to each object in the report individually. The ability to customize the resulting attributes from your custom query is easy, as you can see in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Select which attributes appear in your custom AD reports.
Most of us must track down objects in AD based on many different search criteria. Microsoft ADUC is severely limited on providing a solution for these searches. However, as you can see from the above examples, ADManager Plus provides custom searching and results with a few simple clicks. Find out for yourself how powerful ADManager Plus can be in your environment
