It is fast becoming common knowledge that Microsoft will not be making one size fits all tools anymore. Instead, they will provide the basic tools and PowerShell support to automate/extend specific tasks. For proof of this, look no further than Office 365 or any other hosted Microsoft Service. But this change is good! IT Administrators can extend their tools to their environment. While Active Directory Users and Computers (ADUC) is an older tool, you should still modify it to fit your organization. Today, we will cover 3 changes you should make.
Tag Archives: Attributes
Gathering Active Directory Mobile Phone Attributes
“How can I get import numbers into the Active Directory mobile phone attribute?” That was the most common question to the Reset User Password with Self Service blog post. While it would be easy to do this with a massive CSV, that method still means you (the IT Administrator) will have to maintain it. Today, I have two automatic ways for you – both delegate the work to the end user and allow you to keep working on cooler things!
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Restrict Users to Certain Computers
Limiting a user to certain logon workstations is a common administrative task. Doing this is a very repetitive if you have to restrict users to certain computers. Even at that, Microsoft limits you to only 64 workstations when you are entering them in using the GUI. Although you can add additional computers in the AD attribute editor, it is still a huge (comma separated) pain!
To understand the problem, we will do it manually once. Open the user’s properties, go to the Account tab then click “Log on To”. Then add each computer one at a time. It will not take wildcards.
What if you could add a lab of computers just by typing the users name and computer name or prefix? What if you could add an entire site to a guest user automatically? Well you can using PowerShell! – you had to know that line was coming 🙂