FREE: Group Manager – Allows end users to manage Active Directory group membership

Submitted by Chris Wright – Website: CJWDEV

If you have ever assigned a user or group as the manager of a security/distribution group in Active Directory, you may have noticed the option “Manager can update membership list” which grants the user permission to add and remove members from this group. The only problem with this is that there is no easy way for the user to actually make these changes, other than through Microsoft Outlook.

So Group Manager was designed to be an easy to use tool for end users to add and remove users/contacts/groups to any groups that they are managers of, for any organizations that do not have (or do not want to use) Microsoft Outlook for this task. It will also be useful for any organizations that are using Outlook but are using a hosted Exchange solution, as end users will usually not be able to make changes to the local domain through Outlook in this scenario.

Group Manager is aimed at end users and as such is easy to use and does not require any configuration at all, it will automatically detect the current user’s username and find any groups in Active Directory that they are assigned as the manager of. It will also find any groups that the user is a manager of via group membership (i.e. the user is a member of a group that is assigned as the manager of another group). The user can then view and export the current membership list of the group and add or remove members.

This free edition of Group Manager is aimed at smaller organizations where a user will only be the manager of a single group and where settings will not need to be controlled via Group Policy. If the user is a manager of more than one group they will only see the first group found (the standard edition supports unlimited groups and settings that can be configured by GPO). Hopefully the free edition will still be useful in several organizations.