Another look at Active Directory Administrative Center (ADAC)

09/29/2009

Previously 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 Directory.

We start out by launching the ADAC, by running DSAC.exe from the run window

ADAC offers two views, the list view

and the tree view

There are several useful queries built-in which you can add from the ‘Add criteria’ button such as find all the users with expired passwords

And add multiple criteria to your query

From the task pane, you can create a new user

Its an ease of use to be able to fill in all the pertinent attributes from a single interface

Now you can raise DFL and FFL from one location, previously you had to raise the FFL from AD Domains and Trusts snap-in

From the Global Search page, you can simply also add your own LDAP query

You can add specific navigation nodes into your list-view such as the Users container and apply different filters (query) to do a comparison side-by-side, from the same ‘add navigation nodes’ window you can also add other trusted domains to manage multi-domain environment all in one place.