ADSI for Beginners
Firstly it's important for us to understand how ADSI works, the jargon and where all this stuff becomes useful.
OK, well, ADSI is really a set of interfaces through which a provider (for example the Windows NT system) can publish its functionality. Each provider must conform to the basics of the ADSI structure, although it can offer additional features.
This may sound a little confusing, so lets use a diagram to help out:
This diagram (hopefully) makes the concept of namespaces and ADSI a bit clearer. Firstly, your code interacts with the ADSI structure. Through a set of common interfaces (IADsContainer etc) a variety of providers can make their data available. In this example the WinNT provider is being made available through the ADSI structure, with the data being Windows NT user information and other such details.
To put these things in to a more practical application lets look at some simple but useful scripts using ADSI and the WinNT provider...
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This article was originally published on November 20, 2002