Common administration tasks
Common types of administrative tasks you can perform using ADAC
include creating, configuring, and managing the following types of
objects:
Creating organizational units
Creating a new organizational unit (OU) using ADAC involves
the following steps:
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Right-click on the desired parent domain or OU, select
New, and then select Organizational Unit:
-
Enter the necessary data, and make the required selections
on the different sections of the Create Organizational Unit
properties page, which is shown in Figure 5.
ADAC properties pages like this include several features that
make them easy to use:
-
Required information is indicated with a large red
asterisk.
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Different sections in the page can be hidden or restored
to view by selecting the Sections control at the top right of
the page. By hiding sections you never use, you can make the
page easier to navigate.
-
The Tasks control at the top right of the page lets you
quickly perform certain tasks associated with the object or
container type represented by the page. For example, you can
move or delete the selected OU by using the Tasks control on the
properties page for the OU.
-
The same properties pages are used for both creating new
objects or containers and for modifying the properties of
existing objects or containers.
One of the benefits of using ADAC list view is that you can
customize this view by adding nodes representing Active Directory
containers you frequently need to access to perform administration
tasks on the objects in those containers. For example, consider the
following scenario:
If you are the administrator for the Seattle office, you might
want to customize ADAC list view by adding navigation nodes for the
following OUs to make them easier to access:
-
Seattle Users OU
-
Seattle Computers OU
-
Seattle Servers OU
To do this, you can perform the following steps:
-
Select tree view, and expand the corp domain to show the
hierarchy of OUs and other containers beneath it. This will
include the Seattle OU.
-
Expand the Seattle OU to show the child OUs beneath it.
This will include the Seattle Users OU.
-
Right-click on the Seattle Users OU, and select Add As
Navigation Node:
-
Repeat step 3 for the Seattle Computers OU and Seattle
Servers OU.
Figure 6
shows what list view might look like after you add these three new
navigation nodes. Note that you can rearrange your custom nodes by
right-clicking on them and selecting Move Up or Move Down. Any
actions you perform on these navigation nodes have the same effect
as acting directly upon the Active Directory containers they
represent.
You can also add navigation nodes directly by right-clicking
on any blank area of the navigation pane in list view and selecting
Add Navigation Nodes. Doing this opens the Add Navigation Nodes
explorer shown in Figure 7.
