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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The example we gave when designing the group hijacking feature for GroupID was absurd. Say you owned an Exchange distribution list designed to discuss cookbooks and somebody else owned a distribution group designed to discuss the Anarchist Cookbook…very different sets of users with most likely a very different set of discussions. If the owner of the…