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 cloud?” or “How many consultants does it take to configure FIM?” But what I find a lot is simple, how to report on Active Directory questions.
One surprisingly common question is how to query group membership in Active Directory. Something as simple as that, reporting on Active Directory. Seriously, google it, people are asking about how to find out security group membership or distribution list membership. And, there are a ton of tools and scripts and hacks and whatnots to get you this information.
But you add the word “free” to the beginning of that search and you get a lot of the same things but not many really enterprise level tools. Because something like this should be free. And it should be rock solid and it should be configurable and powerful. Since we have one such free active directory reporting tool, I just assumed everyone had it. Heck, we’ve had over 10,000 downloads of GroupID Reports and its predecessor SmartR. Why are people asking about it still?
On to the report in question, Active Directory group membership. GroupID Reports will output your report in an html format (pictured), XML or Excel. You can edit the report query by any attribute (I ran the one below to just show membership for mail enabled groups named estaff). And you can schedule it and have it emailed to you.
These Active Directory reports are extensive, covering stock reports on users, groups, contacts and computers. Plus the ability to modify them with any query attributes or output fields. And they are free.
You can read more about it or just download it for free, just check the GroupID Reports box and we’ll get the license key and download instructions right out to you.
Jonathan Blackwell
View ProfileSince 2012, Jonathan Blackwell, an engineer and innovator, has provided engineering leadership that has put GroupID at the forefront of group and user management for Active Directory and Azure AD environments. His experience in development, marketing, and sales allows Jonathan to fully understand the Identity market and how buyers think.
This used to be SmartR right? Great tool though I wish you could email the reports on a scheduled basis.