six demon bag

Wind, fire, all that kind of thing!

2010-06-14

Active Directory Documentation

When you inherit an existing (usually home-grown) Active Directory, it can be a real pain to figure out how the thing was actually configured by the previous admin(s). In a situation like that it's kinda nice to have a tool at hand that'll do the dirty work for you.

Of course there's pay-ware like ADscribe, but personally I find $99 kinda expensive for something you're going to use every other decade (or so). Microsoft's own Active Directory Topology Diagrammer is freeware (well, sort of, since it requires Visio), but it has to be installed, and the results weren't that convincing when I tried to run it from outside the target domain.


That is where Nils Kaczenski's José comes in handy. José is a VBScript that can be run either from the command-line or with an HTML Application as its GUI frontend. It doesn't require installation, just unpack the archive wherever you like and run the tool from there.

José GUI

Not invented here, but since I contributed to the project, I'm borrowing the plumes. ;-)

Posted 21:37 [permalink]