Active Directory

In this episode of First Ring Daily, Brad Sams and Paul Thurrott Microsoft laying off 1,900 employees in its Gaming division, and Apple announcing big changes for iOS and the App Store in Europe to comply with the Digital Markets Act.

Microsoft announced some important updates for the Universal Print service at its Ignite 2023 conference today. The cloud-based print service is getting macOS support, allowing users to print from any Mac app without installing third-party drivers or software. Universal Print now supports the pull printing functionality that lets employees securely release their print jobs from…

The Get-ADComputer PowerShell cmdlet is a powerful tool for managing AD computers. It can be used to retrieve information about computer objects, search for computer objects based on specific criteria, and perform various actions on computer objects. What is Get-ADComputer used for? Get-ADComputer is a PowerShell cmdlet that retrieves one or more computers from Active…

If you’ve been an IT Pro for many years (OK, decades), you likely know what an Active Directory OU (Organizational Unit) is. But, what if you’re new to the IT field or new to Microsoft Active Directory? No need to fret or get flustered – read my post to find out about OUs, what they are, and…

In this SQL Server Management Studio tutorial (SSMS), I will show you the primary database management and development capabilities provided by the tool. Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) is the primary management and development tool for SQL Server and has been since its release back with SQL Server 2000. SSMS provides a graphical interface…

Get-ADGroupMember is a useful PowerShell cmdlet for retrieving the members of Active Directory (AD) groups. In this article, we’ll delve into the capabilities of Get-ADGroupMember, explore its common parameters, and provide practical examples to showcase its power and versatility in managing your Active Directory environment. We’ll also touch on a related cmdlet – Get-ADGroup and…

Jeff Hicks shows us how to use PowerShell to enumerate members of very large Active Directory groups.

Microsoft-owned GitHub has just unveiled an expansion of its AI-powered Copilot Chat service that promises to enhance developers’ productivity. The company announced that a public beta of the coding chatbot is now available for all GitHub Copilot individual subscribers in Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. GitHub first started testing Copilot Chat with business customers…

Microsoft’s Local Administrator Password Solution (LAPS) is a legacy Windows tool that IT admins can use to manage account passwords of domain-joined computers. The company has finally updated LAPS this year and plans to bring it natively into Windows in 2023. In this article, I’ll explain how this new native version of LAPS works and…

Russell shows you how to audit access to LAPS passwords in Active Directory and how to establish a process for managing access to local administrator passwords.