In the networks of today, companies can have tens of thousands of
users on hundreds of servers in an organization that spans many
sites. Managing complex systems can take a lot of time, and setting
up the mechanisms to effect sensible management can be cumbersome.
Windows Server 2003 and Windows 2000 provide the administrator with a
variety of tools to manage Active Directory. Unfortunately, these
tools are no help for a variety of tasks that you may need to do en
masse. No one in his right mind creates thousands of user accounts
using the Active Directory Users and Computers snap-in. You can also
manage and manipulate the Active Directory objects using
scripts—and very powerful scripts at that. You can write
scripts to manipulate any object and its properties, and you can port
these scripts to the web, allowing administration through a browser
interface.
Before we start, we want to state categorically that scripting Active
Directory is easy. You don't have to know complex
code algorithms, pointer structures, object class inheritance, or any
of the weird world of complex program languages. Here we use
Microsoft's VBScript language, a very simple
language both to use and to understand. You should have no problem
coming to this section with zero knowledge and being able to
understand and implement the concepts behind the chapters in the
section.
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
