As I’m sure you all know making bulk changes in Windows 2000 isn’t easy to do, at least not with the tools you’re provided out of the box. While 2003 seems to make some improvements in that area, Exchange admins may still be out in the cold in they need to do a bulk update on any number of Active Directory Exchange related objects. If you don’t want to sit in front of your monitor and update all 4000 of your users manually, you do have a few other options. One option is to become proficient with ADSI scripting, but if you’re too busy to learn how to program over night there is a little tool called ADModify that should make a nice addition to your toolkit. The tool can be downloaded from Microsoft’s ftp site here (ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/pss/tools/exchange%20support%20tools/ADModify/). In that directory you’ll see two versions, .NET and 1.6. The tools were designed to allow administrators to make bulk updates to almost any Active Directory attribute, including those relating to Exchange.

The two versions differ slightly. For example, in the .NET version you can update the Manager field that appears on the Organization tab in the ADUC, something you can’t do with 1.6. In the 1.6 version you can update the AD fields called ‘Extension Attributes’ which are 15 fields (blank by default) that appear on the Exchange Advanced tab under Custom Attributes in the ADUC. My organization uses one of these fields to store a value for an employee’s department number so I found this option quite useful. These fields aren’t readily available in the .NET version. However, there is a tab in .NET called Custom that will allow you to update any field not listed on any other tab, which means you can update virtually any AD attribute. If you need to modify a value using this tab, just go into ADSI edit to find the AD name of the value. For instance, to modify the Extension Attribute I referred to earlier, I’d enter extensionAttribute3 in the Custom field.

The .NET version creates a very nice XML file detailing all changes made by the tool, including old values and new values, while the older version creates a standard txt file. There are many Exchange related tabs already built into the tool, including options for email addresses, mailbox rights and protocol settings. For example, you can turn off the http protocol for an entire group of users. And with the Custom tab in the .NET version, you’re limited only by what you need to modify.