Active Directory Administrative Center won’t work if .. ?

03/31/2009

I will tell you that  ‘if’ but first off, for those not aware, meet ADAC, the successor for your ADUC.

Active Directory Administrative Center, an idea long awaited for by AD Admins. Starting in Windows Server 2008 R2 and RSAT tools in Windows 7, you will have a richer administrative console for your Active Directory that will replace the good old ADUC (Active Directory Users & Computers). This is perhaps the first revamped console to manage AD since the very inception of Active Directory in year 2000.

Built on Windows PowerShell™ command-line interface technology, Active Directory Administrative Center provides network administrators with an enhanced Active Directory data management experience and a rich graphical user interface (GUI). Administrators can use Active Directory Administrative Center to perform common Active Directory object management tasks through both data-driven navigation and task-oriented navigation

Yet there is a catch before you take advantage of this powerful tool in your current production environment. You need to have atleast one Windows Server 2008 R2 running DC in your domain. This is a little downside for the early adopters of the technology who would like to take advantage of the extended tool in their current production environment. And without the required scenario as mentioned here, you are likely to see the error as shown below.

Among other things you can do with ADAC, here is a couple of features:

  • Connect to one or several domains or domain controllers in the same instance of Active Directory Administrative Center, and view or manage the directory information for those domains or domain controllers
  • Filter Active Directory data by using query-building search

Some greats blogs have been written on this subject, take a look :

http://policelli.com/blog/?p=305
http://wss-id.org/blogs/bobby/archive/2009/03/24/windows-server-2008-r2-active-directory-administrative-center-first-look.aspx
http://blogs.technet.com/activedirectoryua/archive/2009/01/30/introducing-active-directory-administrative-center.aspx

There are 2 comments in this article:

  1. 28/07/2009What is Active Directory Management Gateway Service (ADMGS)? - Shariq Sheikh | Port 389 say:

    [...] Server 2008 R2 provides a web service that is required by ADAC and

  2. 29/09/2009Another look at Active Directory Administrative Center (ADAC) - Shariq Sheikh | Port 389 say:

    [...] I had briefly written about ADAC and today we take a look at some of the things you can accomplish by this new interface of Active [...]

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