Current mood:

working

Systems admin question if I may:


I'm trying to export a list of all the distribution groups in my company's domain into an Excel spreadsheet. The Active Directory Users and Computers plugin that comes with the Microsoft adminpak doesn't let you export directly to Excel, and it's all I've ever used.

I downloaded something called Powershell, along with a GUI called PowerGUI since I don't speak Powershell's command-line language. It seems like it would be great if it all worked, but I can't get it to work the way I want it to. When sorting by group type, I can't distinguish distribution groups from security groups. Plus, it stops at 1000 items in the same folder and I can't find a way to increase the limit. Plus, no matter how I set the filtering options, nothing filters out. Maybe because Powershell wasn't originally intended to manage active directory (it's for Exchange 2007 and I installed a plugin to manage AD) it doesn't quite work right?

Anyway, can anyone who reads my journal tell someone, like me, who's fairly new to this sort of thing, the best way to learn how to do this sorting and exporting quickly? Is there a tool out there? Do I have to learn a scripting language?

Thanks!