Tag Archives: AD

Modify AD Items in Bulk

I am going through our Active Directory here with the purpose of cleaning things up and making sure everything is up to snuff.  A lot of the changes we want made are common across many users.  I didn’t want to change each user with the exact same information (everyone works for the same company, for example).

I found this great free utility for making bulk changes in AD.  (You can find some additional information about ADModify here as well.)

It’s a bit clunky but it does what it claims to do.

The download is a ZIP and you’ll have to go into the Properties dialog and click to Unblock executable extractions.  There are a few dll’s and a couple of executables in there.  One is a command line tool, but I have only tried the dialog.

You can put it anywhere you’d like.  I put it in a folder where I keep other tools (called Tools).  No installation required.  It will create a log (XML) file in its folder for each operation you perform.  A little annoying but easy enough to manage.

When you run it, it brings up a plain dialog where you can drill into AD.  Once you choose the first two settings (Domain List & DC List) and click the green button you will be able to drill down until you are at the level you’d like to bulk change.  There is an option to seek out in recursive fashion too.  Select the bucket of interest and choose Add To List-> and this will load all the objects per the search you created into the right hand pane.  Select the ones you want (click, ctrl-click, & shift-click work).

Next you will click Next>>>.  This will bring up a more or less familiar AD dialog.  You’ll note the obvious difference that there are check boxes by which you select which items you intend to alter.  Once you check a box you can input data into that field to bulk change all the items selected in the previous step.

Works great and is making this process of cleaning and updating a lot easier.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

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