In every hobby or activity I pursue there is a forum, a central place online where a bunch of us who cannot get enough of something get together to talk about it. Sailing, swimming, baseball….you name it, a lot of great places to discuss the ins and outs. But what about Active Directory? There just doesn’t…
We are turning in our TechEd t-shirt design to the printer today; this always makes me nostalgic so I pulled out my favorite t-shirt. The Active Directory movie thriller, Control your Groups! This epic (not yet made) film is about the virtuous Active Directory Admin being led astray by the femme fatale, Ann Duser. She…
We get role attestation as a customer requirement in Active Directory group management constantly. The problem is that it seems to mean something different to everyone. Bob Bobel describes attestation very well: “Attestation describes any certification review process where an individual swears to or witness/confirm something important. This term is almost universally used to describe…
Users forgetting their passwords is a time honored tradition dating back to the simultaneous invention of the user and the password. Just as Alexander Graham Bell’s first words were “Mr. Watson — come here — I want to see you”, the first user’s first words were “what is my password again?” So we give them…
Most of our clients are either using SharePoint or are considering it. Naturally, we are hearing questions about how our products work with SharePoint, but we are also learning some cool ideas about how GroupID can be used to easily solve some common SharePoint problems. I thought that I might share some of those here.…
Recently, while discussing what makes a healthy Active Directory, the idea of users who have never logged on came up. They have an Active Directory user account but for some reason have never logged on to the network. None of us in the discussion could come up with a single valid reason to keep that…
This is a bit of a loaded question because it is usually the readers of this blog, Active Directory administrators and help desk. In most organizations (85%), Active Directory group creation is done manually, usually in ADUC. When done manually, it takes a long time to get a group created and once created it is…
It isn’t uncommon for us to talk to prospects who see the value of our software, but have to sell it up to their management. Often these IT professionals see the value of automating user provisioning and de-provisioning because it saves them time and because it makes their job easier to have quality and up…
The calculus is pretty established that complex passwords = better security. The corollary to this is that complex passwords = more help desk calls. This is just one of those truths due to the fragility of human memory. So software has evolved to solve this equation. Understanding that passwords will be forgotten and that help…
Have you ever pulled up a colleague’s name in the GAL hoping to find their mobile number only to find it annoyingly blank? Or tried to query Active Directory to find out how many users are in the Marketing department only to realize that Active Directory is woefully incomplete? Welcome to the world of the…