Quest's QAD Cmdlets
I'm generally very focused on Exchange and our PowerShell cmdlets, but I had an opportunity this week to attend a demo session for the Quest "ActiveRoles Management Shell" cmdlets, one of several PowerShell related tools from Quest. This suite of Cmdlets seems primarily targeted to supporting the Quest ActiveRoles server (their outboard provisioning system), but has the wonderful side effect of working directly against regular AD as well.
The cmdlets (in the version I downloaded this week, there are 22 in total) cover AD User, Group, and "Object" management, among several other things. They appear to be primarily wrappers for the LDAP DirectoryEntry behavior that I've blogged about here before. On the one hand, that really just means they're wrapping a function that's already available in the base PowerShell. But, as someone who's... er... "struggled" with the LDAP DirectoryEntry usage, there's definitely something to be said for a rich set of cmdlets to abstract that troublesome usability! Spoken like someone from the Exchange team, I realize -- in Exchange we have implemented lots of cmdlets and strongly-typed objects/properties to make usability easier and more predictable (rather than complex but generic syntax solutions). So, in that sense, I think this is a great solution!
In any case, these cmdlets are useful and FREE. So if that sounds interesting to you, here's the link.
Comments
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
I wanted to blog about this since I read it at Evan Dodds' Blog . The ActiveRoles Management ShellAnonymous
June 25, 2007
Thanks for the post Evan! In fact I have just posted on how Exchange cmdlets and AD cmdlets can be used together so you get the best of both worlds when managing both environments: <a href="http://dmitrysotnikov.wordpress.com/2007/06/25/are-exchange-and-ad-cmdlets-compatible/">Are Exchange and AD cmdlets compatible?</a> Love your blog! Dmitry