A few days ago, MaxPowerSoft released a new version of their Active Directory Reporting tool, which has quite a few interesting new features. 4sysops readers have the chance to win a license worth 299 US dollars (more information can be found at the end of this article).

The most obvious new feature of Active Directory Reports 5.1.1.1 is the new Outlook-like user interface. I think, it is the tool’s biggest advantage over competing products. It does not only look cool, it is also very effective. Even if you already have an Active Directory management suite, you definitely should have a look at this specialized AD reporting tool; it could speed up your reporting tasks significantly. You only need few minutes to have an idea about how you can retrieve all kinds of information from your domains with AD Reports.

Generating a report with AD Reports means narrowing down the range of AD objects in several steps. Some steps are executed with a mouse click. First, you have to decide what type of objects you want to find. With a click on the navigation pane on the left-hand side, you can decide if you want to retrieve information about domains, users, groups, Organizational Units (OUs), or Group Policy Objects (GPOs). As in Outlook, this will open the corresponding category at the top of the navigation pane, where you can further limit your search. For instance, with another click in the user category, you can generate a list of users who have been inactive for 30 days. There are 40 other such subcategories in the user’s category.

The resulting list will be instantly displayed as a table, with the most important object attributes in the middle pane, after you click on the subcategory. You have several ways to organize the output. You can add a new column for each of the object’s attributes by clicking on the Show/Hide column in the taskbar. It is possible to sort the list and you can group objects by their attributes. This all works just like in Outlook. If you click on an object, AD Reports will display its attributes in the pane on the right-hand side. This pane has several tabs (general info, membership, security, LDAP attributes) which let you quickly find an attribute of a particular object.

If the list of objects is too large, or if you want to display a special type of object, you can use filters to further restrict the output. This will be the topic of my next post.

If you want to take part in this contest, please send an email to:

with the subject line:

AD Reports.

Please add your name and the name of your organization for which you will want to use the license. The deadline for this contest is November 25, 2009.