IT-Admins Tool – Overview

The IT Admins Tool allows you to quickly read in various information from Active Directory so you are able to process them further.  It further allows you to read in and investigate NTFS permissions and detect Long Path names in your folder structure.

Active Directory information for domain users, groups, computer and contacts are shown in a table view that allows you to further filter and sort the various properties of the object. You can either directly mark and copy information from those tables or use the export functions to save the information to a file and further process them with other tools and software. If set and used in your environment, you will see who is the manager and the managers manager of a certain user object and who is managed by this person. This is shown in a tree view control and can if set right show complete management structures within the Active Directory user objects. This does not necessarily need to reflect the organizational structure in the company, but it will have influence to certain functions, especially if you use Microsoft Exchange and Outlook. As for groups it becomes often challenging when those are cascaded – groups are members of groups etc. (sub-groups) and even further when you deal with Trusted Domains and you have foreign domain members. The IT Admins Tool does read those sub-groups and their members in and shows them to you in a tree view control so you understand and see all members of the selected group. If further will show foreign member objects in a different color and even allow you to filter in a specific column if a group has foreign members or not.

NTFS ACLs or permissions are hard to see. The IT Admins Tool helps you to make them more visible with a tree view control and a color coding that will show you if there are changes underneath a path or not – depending on the read in path depth. It tries to make something visible that often remains hidden but does have a huge influence on the security structure you actually want to have in place. You are able to see group-members and sub-group members if applicable, what kind of rights they have and where those rights break up. It shows you where your current user didn’t have permissions to read further rights and how many right break up s where found underneath a certain path.

Long paths are a annoyance many sys admins face every now and then. NTFS is able to process pretty deep paths, Windows even has APIs and controls that can work with them. But as for most tools, including Windows Explorer, paths deeper then 248 characters are still a challenge. Users tend to try to open those files and run in to issues calling the Helpdesk. The IT Admins Tool can help you quickly find and identify possible long path names and allows you to be pro-active on the issue or simply provide a list with to long paths to someone that is able to decide on how to rename / restructure those files and paths.

Directory compare is one of the less often needed functions. The IT Admins Tool provides such a functionality, but it as well is very resource intensive depending on the size of the to be compared directories. It will show you difference from both perspectives, left to right and right to left. Depending on the chosen compare options you will see missing files to different attributes and rights.

And finally due to a request I implemented as well a search function. This allows you based on wildcards to search for a file or folder within a specified directory structure. The advantage is, this is bypassing the Windows search function and even reporting if a folder was not accessible. This can be helpful in some situation and was worth implementing it.