Aktiv Tips and Tricks(in html, so as not to require you to have a word document or PDF viewer installer)

Most (all?) of the textboxes for adding users to a group support the following formats: User(with selected domain)[newline]User[newline].... or you can override the selected domain with Domain\User[newline]. You can also use a semicolon ';' instead of a newline, just like in the windows tools

Aktiv keeps a log of every action you perform in a file called "action_log.txt", located in the same directory as Aktiv.exe. You can view it by going to Help->View Log/p>

All Aktiv dataGridViews can be copied from by selecting the desired cells, then pressing CTRL+C.

You can open a group from a folders permissions by double-clicking on it. This is much easier that the traditional Windows way of looking up the folder, manually reading through the groups permissions for the desired access-level, and then typing it into ADU&C snapin. Also, there is a handy filter function that lets you filter the ACL view by either domain, access-level, or both.

DFS can be administered from the DFS Admin tab, or by viewing a folder's properties. Aktiv will first determine if the folder is part of a DFS root, and if so, will determine which DFS Link the folder belongs to(or if the folder itself is a DFS link).

Custom LDAP queries can be entered into the textbox on the SearchAD tab(you can also type your own LDAP property name into the "LDAP Property" dropdown.). If you don't know the LDAP query language, you can learn it easily by studying the textbox as you change the various combobox selections.

You can search for a user by all or part of their email address by searching with the "mail" LDAP attribute. You can also search for all or part of a group description with the "description" attribute, and all or part of a user/group notes with the "info" attribute.

Here is a basic summary of common LDAP attributes:

description: the description property, applies to users, groups, and others

info: the "notes" field on users, groups, possibly others

samAccountName: The login name, also the NT name applies to most (all?) object types.

userPrincipalName: Pointless name that Microsoft created, this has no purpose in life, except to create confusion, since it CAN be different than the samAccountName. It also allows some punctuation that samAccountName does not, for even more confusion.

CN: stands for "common name", is the name used in distinguishedName, just another stupid name, when you really could've just used samAccountName for everything.

sn: surname, or last name

givenName: first name

Search Wildcards: use the asterisk ('*') for a wildcard search, for example: sn=w*l* will grab every last name starting with 'w' and containing an 'L', like Williams, Wilson, etc...