I don’t know if you are in the position to do so, but if you are able I would consider consolidating your “many” OUs.  There have been a lot of discussions over what to use OUs for so I won’t go into detail here, but I think the general consensus is to use them primarily to aid in grouping for administrative control.  GPO application can be controlled by group membership.  Especially with only ~500 users, I think you’re seeing the administrative headaches associated with a complex OU structure.  It’s just a suggestion, but I think it might make life easier for you.

 

Here is a quote from the book Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Unleashed, and a link to the chapter (though this is not an endorsement, I have not read the whole book):   http://www.samspublishing.com/articles/article.asp?p=98126&rl=1

 

While there is a tendancy to use organizational units to structure the design of Active Directory, OUs should not be created to just document the organizational chart of the company. The fact that the organization has a Sales department, a Manufacturing department, and a Marketing department doesn't suggest that there should be these three Active Directory OUs. An administrator should create organizational units if the departments will be administered separately and/or policies will be applied differently to the various departments. However if the departments will all be administered by the same IT team, and the policies being applied will also be the same, having multiple OUs is not necessary.

Additionally, organizational units are not exposed to the directory, meaning that if a user wants to send an e-mail to the members of an OU, he would not see the OU structure nor the members in the OU grouping.

To see members of an organizational structure, Active Directory groups should be created. Groups are exposed to the directory and will be seen when a user wants to list members and groups in the organization.

Just my $.02

 

Rich

 

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Rich Milburn
MCSE, Microsoft MVP - Directory Services
Sr Network Analyst, Field Platform Development
Applebee's International, Inc.

4551 W. 107th St
Overland Park, KS 66207
913-967-2819
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”I love the smell of red herrings in the morning” - anonymous


From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Navroz Shariff
Sent: Wednesday, January 04, 2006 2:35 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] Locating which OU a specific use account is in

 

Well, my company has many departments each separted in AD with its own OU. Having over 500 users, it is hard to find which specific OU they are located. I am aware that I can perform a search in AD but having a script handy would make it much easier in doing the search. In addition, having a functionality to export the results to a file would be great for reporting which user belongs to what department. I have gone around TechNet's script center searching for what I want but all scripts regarding retrieving user account property values need values for CN, OU, DC. What I am looking for is knowing values for CN and DC when querying LDAP, would return the value for OU.

 

Thanks for all your replies.

 

-Nav

 


From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Al Mulnick
Sent: Wednesday, January 04, 2006 12:57 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [ActiveDir] Locating which OU a specific use account is in

Script?  Have you seen Joeware.net's adfind.exe ?

How about DSQUERY?

 

If you really wanted to do that in script you could.  There's likely enough examples to cobble together something like that on scriptcenter (technet).

 

Does that help? If not, can you expand on why you would want to know the OU a user is in?  Do you need to write this to a file? Use it for something else?

 

On 1/4/06, Navroz Shariff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Dear list,

 

Does anyone know of a script that, when a domain username is entered, would locate which OU the account is located in if, for the sake of argument, the OU structure in AD was designed in a way that user accounts were separated?

 

Thanks advance,

 

-Nav

 

 

 


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