Active Directory Management Tools

Active Directory can become a complex and large database to work with. If you need to make modifications to several objects at once you will find that Active Directory provides very little built in functionality for this.

Active Directory Management also would include the need for creating reports but you will also find there are no options for this. Microsoft does have some 3rd party utilities to help on reporting and managing Active Directory but it’s not an all in one solution.

I have came across several tools in my years as an Windows Administrator that do much better reporting, monitoring, and managing Active Directory.

My favorite tool is Hyena by SystemTools. This is not only an Active Directory Management tool, it really helps centralize all of your day to day administrative tasks. Some of features of Hyena include; NTFS permissions, printers, job and task scheduling, event management, the list goes on and on.

You can also create custom tools and push them to all the workstations. One tool I created was to delete the windows update files and restart the windows update service on all workstation in our domain. What I like best about Hyena is the reporting options. I can open Active Directory Groups and easily export its members to a text or csv file. I can open a view of all Active Directory users or computers and add new columns to give me better details on the objects in Active Directory.

The latest versions has added support for Windows Server 2008 that includes managing the new fine-grained password policies and password settings objects in Windows 2008 Server

I have listed several Active Directory Management Tools in the Active Directory Software section of my site, including Hyena. It’s a list that continuous to grow. If you know of some good Active Directory Tools please send them my way and I will put them up on my site.