I have been toying with an idea for a while since I have been diving deeper into Active Directory stuff with Powershell.

The idea is to develop a full Active Directory object backup and recovery tool. There are several excellent tools available commercially that do this, but with IT staffs and budgets shrinking it is often difficult to justify the cost.

I am sure others have thought about it, maybe dabbled with it, but it seems to me that all of tools and components are available to do this, just that nobody (that I know of) has kind of glued them all together in an easy-to-use interface.

I know many of you may say “Hey, doesn’t Microsoft have an AD Recycle Bin now?”. Well yes, they do…BUT many folks, I believe, are probably still running 2003 AD instances. Regardless of all of that, though, this sounds like a good exercise to at least explore doing a larger-scale “application” using Powershell.

This will also be my first major dive in the Powershell V2.0, so I hope to be discovering new and interesting ways to put these tools together.

From my perspective, I see several main components that will need development:
1. A user Interface. While I have done some of this with “visual” languages and a touch with Powershell, I haven’t done anything very extensive.
2. Interfacing with some type of database solution (probably SQL Server)
3. Access to AD objects without 3rd party utilities. I think this will be fairly straightforward but may end up using the Quest tools.
4. Access to the “delete objects” container in the directory and a means to reanimate those objects. (SDM Software Group has some great cmdlets for doing this which I will probably look at using).
5. General functions for manipulating AD objects (again…pretty easy)

One question keeps coming to mind, though is whether something like this would be useful? I am not entirely sure, but I hope so! To that end, I think the journey may be more worthwhile than the outcome.

Anyway, I hope to be spending more time with (when I *HAVE* spare time) and I hope to chronicle this “journey” here as I go.

If anyone has an opinion on this undertaking or has advice, please let me know.

Stay tuned for updates. Right now I am standing up a small infrastructure at home to support this development effort.

Thanks and Happy Scripting!

— Mark