Active Directory Powershell Blog

ADPowershell is available starting Windows Server 2008 R2 . To play with AD Powershell cmdlets, you must have at least one Windows Server 2008 R2 domain controller (DC) in your domain. Installing AD Powershell module: On a Windows Server 2008 R2...

Active Directory Web Services (ADWS) is a new windows service introduced in Windows 2008 R2 that enables remote management of any local directory service instance using WS-* protocols. ADWS supports the following web service protocols: WS-Transfer...

In my previous post I discussed about the various features available in -Filter parameter aka “advanced filter”. This post extends the previous one and discusses about the various operators supported in Advanced Filter and also give examples using each...

Windows Server 2008 R2 doesn’t just add ADPowershell – it also adds Active Directory Administrative Center (or ADAC), a new GUI tool for AD administrators. Read about it here . What’s more, while you can’t tell just from looking at it, ADAC is implemented...

Active Directory Powershell implements two Powershell Provider cmdlets specifically for access control management in Active Directory: Get-ACL and Set-ACL. This blog series is to give a few examples on how to use them. Note that it is not intended for...

Few weeks ago I came across this question “How to find out an account’s password expiration date” in one of our internal mailing-list. This looks like a simple question, but when we tried to find the answer we realized it is not a trivial...

Do you find it difficult reading/writing LDAP filters? Do you wish you could write LDAP filter in a more natural way? Have you ever wished that Ldap filter parser message should point you to the exact error character in your filter string instead of displaying...

In this opportunity I am going to provide a solution to manage sites in your Active Directory (AD) forest by extending Active Directory PowerShell by implementing functions that allow creation, retrieval, update (moving to a site link, renaming) and deletion...

Adding/removing members belonging to the same domain from a group is very simple using AD Powershell cmdlets. All you have to do is pass an identifier (either samAccountName, distinguishedName, securityIdentifier or GUID) of the member and group to one...

In an earlier post “Active Directory Powershell to manage sites – Part 1 (New-XADSite)” Jairo explained in detail about how to create a Site in Active Directory using AD Powershell. In today’s post I am going to discuss about how to create Subnets using...

Hello folks! Here are few Active Directory Powershell script snippets that you will find useful while writing scripts. They deal with fetching sites, subnets and servers. Most of the snippets are simple and self-explanatory and can be simply copy-pasted...

All of you who have used the Active Directory (AD) powershell module would have noticed that every time you import the AD module, a default drive ‘AD:’ is also loaded. So when you type the following command: Import-module ActiveDirectory...

Accidental deletions can happen in Active Directory in many ways. An administrator can end up deleting a single user object unintentionally or fat finger an entire tree of OUs. A rogue script could end up deleting multiple objects at multiple locations...

Many of the readers have expressed interest in having the ability to manage their down level (running Win 2003/2008) DCs using ADPowershell. The only missing piece was the availability of the Active Directory Web Service (ADWS overview here ). Well, ADWS...

Welcome to Active Directory Powershell Blog! This blog is written by a group of developers, testers, program managers and technical writers from the Active Directory Powershell team. We are here to answer any questions about AD Powershell, share some...

Some of the blog readers have mentioned that it would be great to have AD Powershell cmdlets available on the Windows 7 client sku. The Microsoft Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) package addresses this exact issue. Here is the download location...

Although it is pretty easy to get the list of AD cmdlets using Powershell, many of you might be looking for a high level view of cmdlets classified by AD administrative scenarios and tasks. So here it goes… The current set of AD Powershell cmdlets...

People familiar with LDAP, ADSI or third party Active Directory Powershell cmdlets might be wondering where are the cmdlets for making and closing a connection? The answer is: connection lifecycle is automatically managed by AD cmdlets. If you want...

In this post we will see the Powershell way of redirecting Users and Computers containers (i.e. Powershell equivalent of tools: redirusr.exe and redircmp.exe ). By now you might know that you can use Get-ADDomain cmdlet for viewing the well-known containers...

Metadata associated with Active Directory Replication is exposed in AD via many constructed attributes. Some of these metadata attributes come in pairs of binary blob & xml representation of the metadata element. Constructed Replication...

Today, I am going to show how we can leverage the power of Powershell V2 and Active Directory Module, and easily write powerful, professional cmdlets (with help message, positional parameters, default prompting, error handling etc.) for AD. Couple...

In this blog, I will discuss the Active Directory (AD) PowerShell error reporting. Good error reporting is critical and it saves time to resolve an issue. Let's start with the basics. In case of error, AD PowerShell cmdlet prints the error details...

In this posting I am sharing a simple but useful function that you might need to use in many of your scripts. This is a function that returns true if a given AD object exists provided its identity. The Identity parameter can receive any ADObject identity...

AD Powershell uses .NET class X509Certificate to represent a certificate. Let's see how you can manage the certificates for a user. Update User Certificates You can create a X509Certificate (or X509Certificate2 ) object using the certificate file...

This tool started when I was finding ways to analyze the complexity of group memberships in AD. Other than the usual average/median/min/max of number of members, number of memberships etc, I was also interested in finding out the maximum nesting levels...