Sean Wallbridge
One of the things that can drive your poor scribe nuts is a “dirty” AD. I have lost count of the number of customers I’ve been at, large and small, where the AD is a total dog’s breakfast. The upshot is it becomes pretty hard to provide any sort of effective management of their systems when you spend hours trying to figure just what the heck is going on.
Case in point: we (itgroove) have a customer that had an admin that would create multiple accounts in the AD for every user AND create computer accounts with the same name as the user. We are in the process of migrating this customer to Exchange and we have spent hours trying to unravel the AD and match up desired email addresses with the proper AD accounts. Don’t laugh! It has been a “process” and one that is costing them on an ongoing basis. You should NOT have to spend hours with charts, matrices and some person that can read tea leaves in order to decipher your AD.
People, spend a little time and clean up your AD! OU’s can be your organizational friend and a little thought up front can save you (and those who rely on your AD) lots of time down the road. And while you are at it, take advantage of the “Description” field that is part of most AD objects; a little extra information can go a long way when you are looking for a particular item:
And thanks to Sean (see link to his blog on the right) for the timely reminder about the description field.