Question

Pardon my ignorance, I do not know much about AD (let lone querying with AD or googling for that). I would like to get a list of all the users in a particular domain, their first name, last name and email ids. Would a network admin (or help desk in my case) be able to do that ? My other option: I have the usernames in an excel sheet, Full name in another text file (amongst other data – say XXXyy , FirstName LastName- I would have to split,parse it to extract the name) and email in another file and none of them are in order. There might be some missing data too 🙁

What would be the best way to go about it with Querying AD ?

Edit:May be I should be more specific. If I was seeing what my network admin would be doing to get me this info, what would he be doing ?

Answer 1

Active Directory exposes query interface via OLE DB and ADO. The provider is "ADsDSOObject", the query syntax goes like this:

<LDAP://mydomain.com>;(objectType=user);givenname,sn

Perversely, the URL schema name LDAP must be capitalized.

Excel does not have a built-in ADO client, unless you code in VBA.

UPDATE: wrote a simple JavaScript query script for you:

var conn = new ActiveXObject("ADODB.Connection");
conn.Open("Provider=ADsDSOObject");
var rs = conn.Execute("<LDAP://your-domain.com>;(objectClass=user);sn,givenname");
var i;
if(!rs.EOF)
{
    rs.MoveFirst();
    while(!rs.EOF)
    {

        WScript.Echo(rs.Fields.Item("givenname")+","+rs.Fields.Item("sn")+"\n");
        rs.MoveNext();
    }
}

It queries the fiest and last name of all users in your domain. Place your domain name in the third line. Then save it as a .js file, and execute thusly:

cscript adquery.js >a.txt

And you’ll end up with a text file called a.txt, with the names of your users, comma-separated. Import it into Excel or something.

In Excel, if you are willing to mess with macros, you can write a VBA function against ADO that performs the same query. Or use .NET’s DirectorySearcher, recent versions of Excel let you consume .NET objects.