If you work in an environment that has a Microsoft Active Directory domain and you are responsible for user account management you know how often you have to do things such as unlock user accounts or reset passwords for people who can’t seem to remember them. You may also have the need to make changes such as forcing a user to change their password at their next login or set an account to expire on a certain date if it’s a contractor account for example.
CJWDEV is a software company that makes a bunch of great Active Directory tools as well as other utilities such as a software auditing program and a NTFS permissions reporter tool. One of their Active Directory tools is called Account Rest Tool and allows you to connect to your AD environment from the program and perform tasks such as resetting passwords, unlocking accounts as well as enabling and disabling accounts.
Of course you can do the same tasks from the Active Directory Users and Computers utility but that requires you to log into your domain controller or have the Windows server management tools installed on your workstation. This may not be a wise choice for novice admins where you don’t want them to be able to do anything else but manage user accounts or don’t want to give them domain controller access.
All you need to do is install the Account Reset Tool on the admins computer and put in the proper credentials that have the rights to change domain user accounts. You can even have the software query a specific domain controller each time it’s used if you like or only load users from a particular OU (Organizational Unit).
Once the software is configured it’s very easy to use and anyone with any domain or user account administration experience should not have any problems figuring it out. All you need to do is select the user account you want to change and then edit the sections you need or check the unlock account box and click on Reset Account and you are done.
The Account Reset Tool also comes with a Group Policy ADM file that you can import into your Group Policy that will load configuration settings into the tool for the users automatically allowing you to control what they can do and can’t do with it.
The Account Reset Tool is free to download and use so check out the CJWDEV website and try it out for yourself.