Active Directory, 5th Edition

Chapter 3. Active Directory Management Tools

Out of the box, Windows is equipped with a multitude of tools for managing Active Directory. Unfortunately, unless you know which tool is suited to your task, it can be challenging to figure out how to get something done without digging through various consoles. Even worse, sometimes there is no GUI for performing a task—leaving you to figure out the appropriate command-line utility or PowerShell command.

This chapter aims to give you a tour of the various management tools that come with Active Directory so that you have a general idea of how to accomplish a task. Throughout this book, you will find references to management tools—both GUI and command-line—and descriptions of how to perform specific tasks with those tools. We won’t cover tools that get proper coverage elsewhere in the book in this chapter but will instead direct you to the proper chapter to get the information you need.

3.1. Management Tools

The original release of Active Directory in Windows 2000 came with a series of Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-ins that enabled GUI-based management of most of the directory. Over time, these snap-ins were improved, but there has not been any major evolution of the Active Directory GUIs that came with Windows 2000. Windows Server 2008 R2 introduced the first version of a new GUI tool for managing Active Directory: the Active Directory Administrative Center (ADAC). ADAC was then further improved upon in Windows Server 2012 to add ...