Manage Windows AD with PowerShell

Organized

On many networks, Active Directory (AD) is the must-have setup for authentication and assignment of rights and as a directory service. With such a central service, everything should run smoothly with PowerShell automation. In this article, I show you how to search in AD, how to secure critical accounts, and which PowerShell helpers you will want to use.

Administrators have gained a lot of experience in maintaining and operating Active Directory over its 20-year history. The tools and how they programmatically and automatically trigger changes in the directory have also changed, both in terms of data administration (i.e., managing users, computers, service accounts, and all the other objects in the directory) and in terms of the scripts for controlling the directory service itself (i.e., the service that runs on Windows and provides the domain function). Tasks that used to be automated by VBScripts, plain vanilla LDAP, Win32 calls, and, later, .NET are now a little easier for admins and abstracted by PowerShell.

PowerShell Helpers

Even newcomers or occasional scripters should have a few decent tools for creating scripts or one-off commands in their toolbox. On the one hand, the commands can be assembled with autocompletion, after which parameters can be suggested and easily inserted; on the other hand, tools allow the one-liners or scripts to be executed directly with color coding, thus making copy and paste into a separate PowerShell session unnecessary. The tools also allow individual lines from longer scripts to be executed separately for step-by-step testing. Of course, it is also possible to open a separate PowerShell session and enter and process the commands directly, but why make things more difficult than necessary?

Windows comes with the PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE) as an add-on: It is immediately ready for use in PowerShell but is no longer actively

... comments powered by Disqus