Cool. The official history of the dogcow.
Seems as though Microsoft removed some features in the transition from NT to 2000 as well as adding some. For example, the I-can’t-tell-how-useful-this-is NT User Wizard, which allowed you take an Excel spreadsheet of user information and flow it directly into the server, is gone. I used it to create student accounts. I got the tab-delimited file from our SIS system, brought it into FileMaker to assign passwords and check account lengths and such, then export it to Excel. From there, the User Wizard created each account, assigned the password, and even created the user’s home directory with the correct permissions. But it’s gone. Instead, I’ve noticed several packes that claim to do the same for 2000, each costing around $1000 and up. I suppose that’s a “developer opportunity” provided by Microsoft.
So today I dug out my copy of Programming Active Directory, which I got for free (!) for attending an Active Directory seminar for K12 at Microsoft’s regional office. And yes, it did feel somewhat like going into Mordor.
Anyway, the book not only the information I needed to write some scripts to do the work for me, it had a script for setting the password. So with a nice combination of Windows Scripting Host, BBEdit, FileMaker Pro, CSVDE, and Excel, I did everything I needed to do without spending a dime. Took me all day, but I saved $1000.