Chapter 17: Scripting Administrative Tasks

Overview

This chapter contains many examples that will illustrate some basic ADSI programming principles and that at the same time will be useful to an administrator. You can easily extend functions of every script to meet your specific tasks. As well, you can look up all examples given, since many scripts illustrate programming methods useful in various scenarios that are different from the main purpose of these scripts. You can combine elements of the scripts and thus quickly start composing your own scripts or applications without an extensive familiarity with all ADSI interfaces and techniques.

All proposed examples are written in either VBScript or Visual Basic languages. You can easily translate them into another language, for example, JavaScript or Perl. The rules of converting a VBScript script into a Visual Basic application (and vice versa) were stated in the previous chapter.

This chapter covers how to use ADSI with Active Directory only (plus one example illustrates WMI). Remember, however, that you can also use scripts for managing many other components of Windows systems (including Windows NT and Windows 9x/ME) — via WSH objects or WMI — and the WinNT provider can be used for managing both Windows NT and Active Directory-based domains (Windows 2000 and Windows .NET).