General
What can I do with Active Administrator?
Active Administrator is an all-inclusive Active Directory management platform that provides the ability to secure, manage, maintain, audit and prevent problems across Active Directory and Group Policy environments from one cost-effective software solution. Active Administrator now provides six powerful integrated Active Directory and Group Policy management areas within one integrated solution, including: centralized change control, auditing and reporting; backup and quick recovery; offline Group Policy editing and rollback; simplified delegation and enforcement of security; health assessment and monitoring; and proactive user and account maintenance to keep Active Directory operating efficiently and securely.
We migrated to Active Directory and set up a load of delegated permissions, but now we don't know "who can do what". How do we clean it all up?
This is a common problem. Native AD tools have the ability to establish delegated permissions, but no simple way to identify and report on those delegations. Active Administrator makes it easy to find assigned permissions and generate reports to begin the cleanup process. With Active Administrator you assign delegated permissions using Active Templates, which make it easy to track who can do what, and let you quickly revoke or edit delegations. Active Templates are self-healing so if permissions accidentally get changed they are re-set to the intended state.
Why should I worry about AD accounts and what’s being used or not?
Not having a handle on all your AD accounts and what is actively being used or not can result in wasted costs for your IT group, more management, more licensing costs and most importantly more security risks if accounts are not disabled after employees leave. Active Administrator can quickly help scan, assess, and identify inactive users and computers in a domain environment, clean up these accounts, and ease the management going forward in an automated, proactive manner. Choose to scan and identify inactive users and computers one-time and preview what is in the environment today, figure out what rules work for you with these accounts, such as if you want to disable them or move to a special OU. Then once comfortable set a policy to run on a scheduled basis for ongoing account management going forward without lifting a finger. As accounts change and the policy runs alert notifications go out and you can review the comprehensive audit trail and reports when you need to.
How can I help my remote users remember to change their passwords? Compliance regulations require us to have stronger password policies in place and that increases security, but it also increases our support headaches in IT.
You're not alone, we heard from many administrators they are spending more time trying to help fix Active Directory user accounts for individuals who forgot to change their password before it expired and especially those remote users who didn't see the built in pop up on password expirations in their tray. Active Administrator now has a simple way for administrators to reduce user and password headaches and maintenance with a new policy that can be scheduled and automates sending a friendly and customized password reminder to all individuals who have passwords that are nearing expiration. This is designed to be a friendly reminder type message of course and we give you some suggestions, but you can customize the email with special notes or whatever is on your mind.
Is Active Administrator a complete health monitoring solution?
No. Active Administrator now includes several new broad areas designed to quickly ease the administrator burden on monitoring the overall health of the Active Directory environment. When Active Directory is not configured or is not working properly, it can create havoc across the entire organization and be difficult to trace down root cause analysis. The new features in this release are geared towards helping to find big problems fast, do quick checkups, and deliver scheduled reports. Active Administrator now includes basic Active Directory assessment reporting and health checkup functionality on the most problematic areas that can cause serious issues within Active Directory environments-Active Directory configuration and changes and Active Directory replication.
Do I need to have a 2003 or 2008 Domain Controller? Will it work with Windows 2000? Does it support Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2?
Active Administrator works great in Active Directory built on Windows Server 2000, 2003, 2008, 2008 R2, or any mixture of them. One important note is that to use the object-level Restore function you must have at least one Windows 2003 or higher Domain Controller in the domain. Windows 2000 is only supported as an audited domain controller.
Is there a way to tell what the value of an attribute in AD was before the change was made?
Yes! Active Administrator collects and centralizes all information regarding changes, including who made the change, when, where and the before and after values. With Active Auditing you can see real-time who made the changes and all details easily in whatever format works for you-query and filter details on changes in the real time audit viewer, tag audit entries for follow up, email specific items to administrators if you have a question, use and schedule formatted reports, receive customized email alerts and notifications.
What about built-in AD tools?
Windows comes with some AD management tools out of the box, but these tools are limited in functionality and management scope. This is the very reason Active Administrator was created-you can leverage your existing investment in Active Directory coupled with Active Administrator that provides advanced security administration capabilities, centralized auditing and alerting, delegation and permission management, Group Policy management and object-level AD recovery.
I already use Microsoft Group Policy Management Console (GPMC) for my Group Policy Management. Why do I need Active Administrator?
Active Administrator offers a complete GPO management solution for all versions of Group Policy including offline GPO management, advanced RSoP modeling, GPO history and rollback, change control with GPO comments and auditing and reporting of all AD changes including Group Policies. For a more comprehensive comparison at the Group Policy Management features found in Active Administrator and GPMC, take a look at our Group Policy Management Comparison Matrix.
Can I find out who changed what and when in AD? Even going back 12 months?
Yes! Active Administrator maintains its own centralized auditing database and simplifies change control. No more worrying if an event log rolled over or trying to sift through multiple DC event logs to find events. With Active Administrator all information is in its own SQL database and all is customizable to what works best for your organization. There are no limits on how long the auditing data is kept-if data is not needed for example beyond one year there are options for automated database maintenance and purging too. Administrators can mark specific audit entries with comments on what happened to help later on and use custom "tags' as well to help correlate and filter events. You can keep your data forever with as much or as little details as you need.
Is there really an "undo" function for AD in Active Administrator? Is it really like a "recycle bin"?
Active Administrator's recovery capability allows administrators to selectively recover deleted containers, users, groups, computers and other objects, and also to restore changed attributes. This essentially gives administrators an "undo" inadvertent deletions or modifications of all objects and even entire OUs. Additionally, the Group Policy History function allows for easy corrections to unwanted Group Policy changes.
What formats does Active Administrator support for generating reports on Active Directory?
Active Administrator supports a wide variety of common formats for reports and includes the ability to schedule, save, print, email, delivered to a file share in many different file formats including PDF, HTML, MHT, FTF, Excel, CSV, Text or Image format (BMP, GIF, JPG, EMF, WMF, PNG, TIFF).
How can I help improve Active Administrator?
Share your feedback and product experience with us. Use the Product Feedback links in the application. Share it with our staff, sales representatives, technical support and anyone you interface with. We've also added a new way in case you don't have time to do that with our ScriptLogic Software Improvement Program for Active Administrator. This gives our customers a simple way to share information that will help us make the software better. Your participation in this program will enable us to solve problems faster and get to market quicker with new releases and new features you need. This program collects anonymous information, including only high-level feature usage statistics, demographic information on your environment (such as operating system) and application information on major exceptions.
What is the Export Control Classification Number (ECCN) number for this product?
ECCN numbers for all ScriptLogic products are available from http://www.scriptlogic.com/company/export.asp
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Active Administrator Licensing
For more information on Active Administrator licensing, see the Licensing FAQs page