How to Add New AD user "attribute"?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Fred Yarbrough
  • Start date Start date
F

Fred Yarbrough

We want to add a couple of new "attributes" to our AD user accounts. I am
not sure that "attribute" is the correct wording but here is what we want:

Like you have these "attributes" by default for each user
Description:
Office:
E-mail:

we would like to add these
Employee#:
CostCenter:

I am quite certain that this will be a Schema modification but I am just not
sure how to properly do this? Any help is greatly appreciated.


Thanks,
Fred
 
Adding a new attribute will indeed be a schema modification and if you do
this be careful to test thoroughly beforehand as schema changes cannot be
deleted.

You may not have to change the schema though as there is already a user
attribute called employeeID that you could use. There are many attributes
for a user object, only a small subset are displayed in the ADUC console so
its likely you may be able to use an existing, unused attribute rather than
adding a new one. This link gives a good listing of the default attributes.
http://www.kouti.com/tables/userattributes.htm
 
Thanks to both of you! The EmployeeID will work fine. I will look into
your suggestions.

Fred
 
Bear in mind that schema modifications and attribute additions, etc. don't
change the ADU&C MMC. This is hard-coded, and the only way you can extend
this is to write your own extensions or a new GUI.
 
Good point. This really sucks. Why is the ADU&C not able to be somewhat
customizable depending upon what you want to show? Our Help Desk normally
creates the user accounts and now I will have to go behind them and manually
populate these "hidden" attributes. You can have 10 zillion attributes but
Microsoft will choose the 12 that you can display and edit through the GUI.
Really stupid IMHO.


Thanks,
Fred
 
Whip up a script or ASP page and make the Helldesk, whoops...I mean
helpdesk, use this instead of DSA.MSC
 
Yeah, I guess that this is what I will have to do but man what a POS. Why
in the world would you create all of these attributes and then hard code the
ADU&C GUI to only show a small portion of them. Now I have to come up with
scripts and other magical tools for our Help Desk to use.

Don't get me wrong, I like Microsoft's products and W2K3 and E2K3 are great
but man is this a crazy limitation. Does anyone know of a 3rd party
software that will allow you to customize the attributes shown similar to
ADU&C GUI?

Thanks,
Fred
 
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