Active Directory Round Up 1/21/2010

Up first in this week's rodeo of AD lil' doggies is a post from the AD team at Microsoft on managing group membership for members who might be in another domain or forest. Using the Add-ADGroupMember cmdlet is pretty straightforward when adding a member from the same domain. But cross domain or cross forest gets sticky. Fortunately the solution is pretty simple. Read the post for all the details.

Next out of the chute is a post from guru Brian Desmond on redirecting Outlook Web Access URLs in Exchange 2010. It's been awhile since I've had to worry about this sort of thing and I wouldn't have thought about it on Exchange 2010, other than the error I would have received.  Brian offers a clear explanation of what changed and what you need to do to get this working properly.

I also read a great post about troubleshooting "missing" domain controllers on DirTeam.com. Needless to say and AD infrastructure has a lot of moving parts. The article explains how to enable logging for the DC locator process which will provide additional debugging information. The debugging information is definitely technical, but I think any experienced system administrator will be able to glean useful information.

Finally, if you are deploying Windows 7 in your environment and want to use Group Policy, you typically won't find any policies unless you are using the Group Policy Management Console (GPMC) on a Windows Server 2008 R2 domain controller. Or do you?  This post offers a few quick tips on how to get to those terrific policies even with out an R2 domain controller.

That's it for this week as I see the chuck wagon pulling up and Cookie rustlin' up some grub.