Reports
The report templates that Directory Inspector provides range from basic to useful to those you'll likely rarely use. There are two main categories of reports: Directory Analysis and Forensics/Discovery. The first category yields a host of basic reports, such as Duplicate User Names, Inactive User Accounts, and User Account Usage. Organizations often want to ensure that usernames or computer names follow a standard. One report promised to help track down errantly named objects, but in my tests, it simply verified that the attributes, such as account name, were within a certain character-length range.
Reports in the Forensics/Discovery section allow for more detailed analysis of objects that match specified criteria. For example, you can locate all accounts with the word temp in the name. Other reports in this category let you list users by group, list users by directory location, and graphically display the relationships among your AD OUs.
These examples of reports might not sound very exciting; however, the power of Directory Inspector lies in its ability to aggregate data from a variety of directory services. You can then use the data in the reports to fix or delete errant groups or accounts.
Some reports generate output in the included Crystal Decisions' Crystal Reports format; you can print these reports directly to your printer or export them to well-known file types including Microsoft Excel, PDF, and HTML. Other reports let you use a Windows Explorer–style interface to drill down into low-level object data. Still other reports generate handsome graphs. For example, Figure 3 shows a graphic of the location of all the user accounts in a domain.
Final Thoughts
Directory Inspector's UI was often difficult to navigate. It's not an MMC snap-in, so it's harder to integrate with my usual toolset. I also sometimes found it difficult to locate the report I wanted. The wizard interface is branching and hierarchical, which means you must click forward and back to locate the task or report you want to view. I would have preferred a tabbed interface that lets you select any point in the process. The UI for selecting directory objects to analyze doesn't show the entire path to the container you choose in the profile, so honing your queries about a desired directory service is cumbersome. Directory Inspector has an alternative Expert interface as well, but it didn't make locating the attributes and the reports I wanted to run any easier. I expect a few UI snags in version 1.x of a product; I hope that future versions make it easier to find the desired data and reports.
Directory services are designed to be easy to query. Thus, you could write your own Microsoft Active Directory Services Interface (ADSI)– or LDAP-compliant scripts and gather the same data that Directory Inspector does. However, most organizations don't have anyone on staff who has the time to create custom reports such as the ones Directory Inspector produces. Take the software for a test drive, and see whether the reports it generates are worth the relatively low cost of this reporting tool.
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John Steinsky January 28, 2004