Welcome
Hello and welcome to Active Directory Tools, a guide to software products available for Active Directory. We hope you find a solution to your Active Directory software needs here.
Top 5 Reasons for Third Party Active Directory Tools
1. Security
Many threats to IT environments are being created each day by those with malicious intent. While many threats are external, the most insidious threat may come from the internal user that has unchecked IT privileges and access to essential data. The Verizon 2010 Data Breach Investigations Report stated that 48% of data breaches are done by insiders. The actions by 90% of those insiders are done on purpose with malicious intent in mind.
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Free Active Directory Reporting Tool
AD Info is a free reporting tool currently in Beta. I was able to download the installer, install it, and run my first report within 1 minute:) It has a nice, easy to use user interface, and many reports including User, Computer, Group, Group Policy, Contacts. It automatically detected the domain and used the credentials I was logged in as by default to run the reports. While domain and credential configuration options are available, I was glad I didn’t have to configure anything to run my first report.
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Active Directory Reading List
The Directory Services Team has put together a comprehensive list of articles covering Active Directory’s core technology as well as advanced topics which they have appropriately titled: Post-Graduate AD Studies.
Web-based User Provisioning with ADAXES
I’m a fan of Softerra’s LDAP Administrator, which I have reviewed here, and finally got around to checking out their new web-based AD management application. Web-based AD managers leverage Active Directory to make it useful for all users in an organization. As a result, they are priced higher than desktop applications that are only used by IT Admins.
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Does Quest OnDemand point to a new breed of AD tools in the cloud?
Quest’s OnDemand Recovery Manager is the first Active Directory management tool built on Microsoft’s new Azure cloud platform. In this post, I review this interesting tool, and take a look at a technology that greatly simplifies integrating on-premise applications with the cloud, and which may lead to a new breed of Active Directory tools.
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A new tool in Windows Server 2008 that simplifies restoring Active Directory
Windows 2003 introduced the feature of snapshots for backing up critical information from the Active Directory Domain Services using VSS (Volume Shadow Copy Services). The problem was that if the DC needed to be restored from snapshots multiple copies would have to be restored and compared to find the best copy. And DC restoration requires a reboot into Directory Restore Mode which could slow down or take down a domain until the Active Directory files were recovered. With Windows 2008 Server a new tool Dsamain.exe and a improved Ntdsutil .exe make the operation simpler and without requiring reboot.
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EmpowerID adds features from Quest ActiveRoles Server
The EmpowerID product started out as a web-
based self-service portal designed to reduce help-desk calls. It allowed users to update their own user information, like their phone number in Active Directory, to reset their own passwords, and also provided a customizable company phonebook. The Dot Net Factory, which makes EmpowerID, has since incorporated many features from Quest’s ActiveRoles Server and it has grown into a full-featured identity management solution.
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Unimpressed with Active Directory Export
I was looking for an easy to use utility to export data from one test Active Directory domain to another test AD lab and came across Active Directory Export. It has an intuitive interface that lets you select OUs,Groups,Users to import or export.
How to export data from Active Directory using the free PowerGUI tool
Many visitors to this site are just looking for a free, or low cost tool 
to help them with a simple task. In this post I step through a common task of exporting data from AD using the free PowerGUI tool, and I highly recommend testing this tool out to see if it suits your purposes.
What the Active Directory Recycle Bin Does Not Do
The new Active Directory Recycle Bin has a somewhat misleading name. Its not like the Windows Explorer Recycle Bin, and there are some things to consider before using this new feature.
