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Active Directory Group Membership Report

One of the beautiful things about our modern world is the availability of information.  If you ask, you are bound to find it.  One of my responsibilities is finding out what people are asking about Active Directory & Exchange.  You would think it would be big picture items: “Can Active Directory be put in the…

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PowerShell and Active Directory

In each of my YouTube chalk-talks where I have created dynamic Active Directory groups, I paused to admire the section where GroupID provides the specific PowerShell command that would create that group in Active Directory.  It is an excellent feature that allows our customers to script some of these commands into existing processes.  The word…

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How to Make Active Directory Groups Dynamic Using Criteria from External Database

Think about all of the data that you have in your infrastructure.  I’d bet that most of it isn’t in Active Directory.  And yet, you would still like to use it for our favorite activity: creating dynamic active directory groups. Here’s an example: HR keeps employees with union membership in a database, safe from prying…

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Use Web-based Active Directory & Dynamic Groups to Force Updates

Having a web based Active Directory update tool allows IT to delegate Active Directory updates to the end user.  But you can do more than just put it out there and hope that end users decide to give you their cell phone number or emergency contact.  You can annoy them until they give you the…

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Did Someone Forget to Deprovision Active Directory User Account?

Jackson Shaw wrote an amusing but oh-too-true story about a user who left his company, came back two years later and STILL had an Active Directory user account.  In fact, this happened to me with an old employer.  There is nothing worse than seeing all the emails that customers had sent over the previous two…

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Active Directory synchronization: a video how-to

In the previous chalk-talk, I discussed making dynamic Active Directory security groups but I ignored an elephant in the room….what if Active Directory isn’t accurate?  What is the point of dynamically managing Active Directory group membership if you are querying against bad and/or faulty data?  To make this important functionality work, Active Directory has to…

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Active Directory group expiration and lifecycle

Every group has its day.  But for Active Directory groups, sometimes those days seem endless.  That is because groups (whether security groups or distribution lists) are usually only needed for a certain time period but there is no simple way to end them.  In the past, the best practice seemed to have been delete it…

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Force An Email Signature Based On Active Directory Group Membership

Most large corporations use Microsoft Group  Policy Objects (GPOs) to force a signature onto employees’ email.  Usually it is a bit of legal mumbo-jumbo (that is the technical term, laymen may use something more descriptive) that states that you had better be the correct person that this email was sent to and it’s not our…

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Do Less And Provide Better Service! Active Directory Self Service To The Rescue.

I just read a fascinating Q&A over at Information Week.  The topic was why CIO’s should pay more attention to their helpdesk functions.  Probably the most compelling reason is that something like 84% of users formulate their impressions of how well IT is doing its job from their interactions with the service desk! The question…

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How to Make Active Directory Group Dynamic

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so a youtube video of GroupID in action should be worth a thousand dynamic Active Directory security groups.  As part of Imanami’s never-ending quest to bring AD group management to light for the marketplace, we recorded a short video how-to for automating AD security group membership…