Many people don’t know this (or care) but when I was first awarded my Microsoft MVP award it was for Windows Networking (which was pretty quickly clarified to Windows Server Networking). At the time I was working on Windows Server books and MCSE study guides of various sorts. I had the pleasure of having Emily Freet as my first MVP Lead. She introduced me to another one of her MVPs, Laura Hunter. A while ago I got a copy of Laura’s Active Directory Cookbook, 3e of course being behind I didn’t get much time to look through it – until this weekend.

One of the things that I’ve always liked about Laura’s knowledge of Active Directory, Networking, etc., is that she’s always thought about the problem not just from the perspective of “how do I do this once” but she’s always been thinking “how do I make this repeatable.” And I don’t just mean from the perspective of writing a process or a procedure. She’s been involved in some VERY large and RAPIDLY changing environments so she’s always had an awareness of the need to script things. That’s one of the things that makes the book so powerful. It’s not just going to show you how to create a user – but how to do it in mass … or via a process. Having been engaged more than once to create tools for working with AD, I can say that I honestly appreciate the work that goes into providing information about how to automate activities in AD.

If you’re looking to manage an environment over and over again … or you have clients that you work with that you want to be able to repeat your work … or you just need coverage of how to do common tasks in AD, I think you’ll find the cookbook has the answers you need.