Subscribe via e-mail: Submitted by Chris Wright
This Active Directory reporting tool been designed from the ground up to be easy to use, as a lot of AD reporting tools are far more complicated than they need to be and often either rely on you having some LDAP attribute knowledge to really get what you want out of them. You won’t ever see any LDAP attribute names or confusing values in the results from AD Info, everything is in plain English and easy to understand.
One thing that a lot of other Active Directory Reporting tools seem to neglect is group membership, and of course that is one of the most common things that people want to report on, so I have included the ability to query/include direct group membership, nested group membership, or both.
You will also notice that rather than just giving you the standard “Users that are members of Domain Admins” query like most Active Directory tools do, my application gives you “Users that are members of specified group” and lets you select any group in your domain, making this query much more useful.
This feature of being able to specify your own query values ‘on the fly’ is used in many of the predefined queries and you can use it in custom queries you create yourself (custom queries can only be created in the standard edition, not the free edition). This makes each query much more useful, as you do not need to have 10 separate queries for finding users with 10 different logon scripts for example, because you can just use the “Users with specified logon script” and it will prompt you for a logon script name each time you run the query.
Of course the dialog windows that prompt you to enter these values are designed to be easy to use as well – if an attribute has a value that holds the name of a group (such as the Primary Group attribute) then you will be presented with a window that lets you enter all or part of the group name and then search the domain for this group. If the attribute holds a date you will be given a calendar to select the date from, if the attribute holds a group scope value you will be given a dialog that lets you select from Universal, Global, or Domain Local.
The free edition of this Active Directory reporting tool is not intended to be a trial for the standard edition (though you could treat it as such if you just wanted to try the application out) – it is simply there to provide IT Pros with a powerful free AD querying tool that is easy to use. So it is not time limited or limited to a certain number of users, domains, or results, and it can export any results to CSV format ready to be viewed in Microsoft Excel or used in another process. There is plenty more to say about AD Info but you can find more information, screenshots and videos on the AD Info’s homepage.
AD Info
(7 votes, average: 3.86 out of 5)
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AD Info looks decent but I’m looking for a similar reporting utility which doesn’t require a .NET Framework.
What is the problem with .NET?
Bret – good luck with that. I’m not sure why you would want to try to avoid .NET when even the majority of Microsoft’s own management tools now are written in .NET… not to mention the thousands of other applications out there that use it.
I have had several apps and utilities which have been broken by .NET Framework updates. It’s like DLL hell all over again. .NET is just a layer on top of the OS and another possible point of failure. Not to mention the incompatible versions. I simply prefer to find something that doesn’t have the .NET prerequisite if possible.
But if you find something that doesn’t have .NET as a prerequisite, it will probably just have something else that is just as bad if not worse for updates breaking things (*cough* java *cough*). I think for the small number of issues that you can have with the .NET framework (I’ve personally never encountered any) you are really shooting yourself in the foot by avoiding anything that uses it, as it is used by so many applications now.
I really appreciate the fact the tool has been developed, glad to see there are people putting so much effort in delivering tools without charging anything for it. Thumbs up to them!
Thanks V – that is good to hear