Yeah - take your time and get comfortable with it before you jump into things - you might want to download and run some of the other sample scripts (above) that Kent and I were playing with - they just dump user info to your console ... might want to create some dump scripts of your own to get a good feel for what ADSI is all about.

Your correct - the WinNT Service Provider of ADSI (eg. "WinNT://DOMAIN/USER") is an AD translation mechanism for NT4 domain objects. And yes - the intent is to allow you to manipulate domain properties in object-oriented style. There are quite a few NT domain objects (classes) supported - DOMAINS,USERS,MACHINES,SERVICES,SHARES, PRINTERS and some others ...

The other nice thing about ADSI (vs the NET command) is that NET always works against the domain that your workstation is joined to (no?). Why MS doesn't allow one to specify the DOMAINNAME on the command line is beyond me! We work in a master/resource domain environment (all accounts on MASTER, WKS's joined to RESOURCE) and ADSI has saved my buns dozens of times. It's acutally quite amazing what information a normal domain can query about themselves and others in a trusted (and with credentials) non-trusted relationship !

In terms of speed - well - any automated approach to user account management is bound to beat the pants off doing it manually through the User Manager gui no ? - even if it takes 15 minutes to update a couple hundred accounts (i've never actually timed it but it should be "fast-enough") ? The sample scripts should give you a pretty good indication on that - try throwing a $USER.GETINFO() into the mix as that will tend to be "worst-case".

Pre-requisite software ? On Windows 2000 pro there are none. On Windows NT & 9x you must install the ADSI 2.5 runtimes - available FREE from Microsoft at the download site above.

Here's the sporty part - NO SERVER PREREQS ON YOUR GOOD OLD NT4 SERVERS !!! The ADSI WinNT service provider translates your object calls into backward compatible NT4 NETAPI calls... sweet eh?.

Anyway - glad you like and heres to hoping you'll pursue and have success !

-Shawn