Chapter 1, Let's Get Started, gives you an overview of the components, software, and modules required to manage Active Directory with PowerShell and gets you kick-started with routine tasks for automation. It also gives you the directions you need to use this book.

Chapter 2, Managing User and Computer Objects, helps users to perform various user and computer account administration related activities using PowerShell. By the end of this chapter, you will have a good understanding of how to manage user and computer Active Directory accounts using PowerShell and perform some of the automations based on it.

Chapter 3, Working with Active Directory Groups and Memberships, focuses on creating, modifying, and querying various kinds of security groups in Active Directory and their memberships. This chapter delivers the skills which are necessary for managing security groups in the Active Directory environment using PowerShell.

Chapter 4, Configuring Group Policies, helps in creating, linking, and unlinking Group Policies at various scopes; also, it is an integral part of Active Directory. By the end of this chapter, you will learn how to create GPOs, link them, enforce them, and perform several other operations using PowerShell. You will also be able to determine what policies are applied to a user and computer, remotely.

Chapter 5, Managing Domains, Organizational Units, Sites, and Subnets, tells you how to manage domains, Organizational Units, sites, and IP subnets using PowerShell. After completing this chapter, you will know how to manage OUs, sites, and IP subnets in your Active Directory environment.

Chapter 6, Advanced AD Operations Using PowerShell, talks about performing some of the advanced operations in Active directory such as promoting and demoting Active Directory domain controllers, the recovery of AD objects, and working with replication using PowerShell. After completing this chapter, you will know how to perform advanced AD operations, which are essential for any Active Directory administrator in a large enterprise environment.

Chapter 7, Managing DFS-N and DFS-R Using PowerShell, demonstrates how to create, configure, and query Distributed File System Namespace (DFS-N) and Distributed File System Replication (DFS-R) using PowerShell. By the end of this chapter, you will know how to administer DFS-N and DFS-R in a complex environment with the help of PowerShell.

Chapter 8, Managing Active Directory DNS Using PowerShell, helps you to understand how to manage AD DNS servers using PowerShell. A variety of operations such as clearing cache, creating and modifying records, working with zones, and many similar operations are covered in this chapter. By the end of this chapter, you will be able manage Active Directory DNS servers using PowerShell to create, modify, and delete records, and perform some of the advanced DNS server operations.

Chapter 9, Miscellaneous Scripts and Resources for Further Learning, gives the information which you need about managing Active Directory using PowerShell. This will also provide references and code samples for some of the frequently performed Active Directory operations. By the end of this chapter, you will know where to look for further help.

This book is written to demonstrate the management of Active Directory in the Windows Server 2012 R2 environment. While all code samples provided here work in the Windows Server 2012 R2 environment, some will work in Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012 environments as well. The system and services that are required to work on are as follows:

If you are looking to automate the repetitive tasks in Active Directory management using the PowerShell module, then this book is for you. Any experience in PowerShell would be an added advantage.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The Get-ADUser command can be used to query user information. We can apply filters to narrow down the results using the -Filter and -LDAPFilter parameters".

A block of code is set as follows:

function Get-ADObjectsCount {
[CmdletBinding()]
param(
)
$Users = Get-ADUser -Filter *
$Groups = Get-ADGroup -Filter *
$Computers = Get-ADComputer -Filter *
$DomainName = (Get-ADDomain).Name
"{0} Users, {1} Computers and {2} Groups found in {3} Domain" -f $Users.Count,$Computers.Count,$Groups.Count,$DomainName
}

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

PS C:\> Get-ADObjectsCount
110 Users, 13 Computers and 83 Groups found in techibee Domain

PS C:\> 

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes, for example, appear in the text like this: "add the Group Policy Management option to install this feature".

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