Since 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.
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…
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…
We just picked our booth for TechEd 2010 in New Orleans. I get up early on booth-picking day, pour some ground glass into my coffee to get in the mood, and prepare for battle. This is because we are placing ourselves in harm’s way. And as the great John Paul Jones said, “I wish to…
When I first heard this use case I thought the customer was crazy. They were using an Exchange dynamic distribution list to troubleshoot Active Directory. Sort of an early warning that their data in Active Directory was going awry. It seemed to me that these groups were for email and that there were tools out there…
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…
Now that the HIMSS conference has wound down, folks are starting to try to make sense of what, by all accounts, was a massive amount of new and important information to digest. One of the nuggets that I pulled out was a pressing and real concern for security in the healthcare infrastructure. The concern was…
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…