70-410 Objective 5.3 – Creating and Managing Groups via PowerShell on Windows Server 2012 R2

In this video for Objective 5.3 Creating and Managing Groups and OUs in Windows 2012 R2 we investigate creating and managing groups via PowerShell. PowerShell is an integral part of Windows 2012 R2 because everything is managed through PowerShell and Windows Remote Management. However, PowerShell by itself is cumbersome to implement for everyday tasks. It does however, excel for repetitive tasks by allowing automation via PowerShell Scripts and that is the basis of this objective. Creating and management of groups via PowerShell is for automation of repetitive tasks that allows for scripting of these tasks in bulk. Such as creation of user accounts in a RBAC or Role Based Access Control environments. Imagine you have several types of employees like Sales, Marketing and Research. Where every time an employee enters into the company they should be members of certain groups… This is where PowerShell scripting gains traction.
We first investigate how to creating a new AD Group via PowerShell using the ‘New-ADGroup’ PowerShell cmdlet. We then look at Active Directory and see the change we’ve made with the PowerShell command. We also look at another tool that can be used at the command line which is DSQuery. This tools helps us get the Distinguished Names for the group and some user accounts we will add to the new group via PowerShell. We proceed to add the members via the ‘Add-ADGroupMember’ PowerShell cmdlet. Then we observe the changes to the Active Directory group. We then discuss why we are learning PowerShell and how it can be applied. We also look at management of groups with the DSQuery command and DSAdd command and how we can add a group to Active Directory. You’ll notice I fumble around a bit with the DSAdd command, because it’s not a common task at the command line. We then proceed to look at AD and see the results. Next we look at adding members to a group with the DSMod command and reviewing the changes in AD. We then review why we use the command line tools to create and manage Active Directory.

Introduction – 0:10

Creating an AD Group with PowerShell – 0:30

Review of what the command did in AD – 2:09

Using DSQuery to query Users in Active Directory – 2:29

Adding members to a group via PowerShell – 3:22

Review of what the Add-ADGroupMember cmdlet did – 3:59

Why are we learning PowerShell – 4:12

Using the DSQuery Command – 4:44

Adding a group with the DSAdd command – 5:35

Review of what the DSAdd command did – 7:36

Modifying an AD Group with DSMod – 7:52

Review of what the DSMod command did – 8:40

Final review of why we use command line – 8:48

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