Using DSMod to update Active Directory

DSMOD foundation course 101

I originally wrote this as an email reply to a colleague’s question about updating many Active Directory objects in one go, and later thought I could write it up “tutorial style”. I still think the DSQuery, DSGet, DSMod functions are underused by even fairly knowledgeable administrators, so here is a beginner’s guide to getting the most of these tools.

This is intended to show the principles for changing many AD objects’ properties in one go. There are lots more clever things you could do with this – like a lot of command line stuff, the principles are very simple but can be strung together to very powerful end results with a bit of thought and a step-by-step logical approach.

Basically, DSMOD allows you to change many (not all) of the AD properties of an object, usually a user, computer or group. This tutorial discusses users specifically, but the principles extend to other objects. Read more of this post