Quest provides ANR search capabilities for PowerShell
Active Directory provides a search mechanism call ANR (Ambiguous Name Resolution) that will automatically search accross multiple attributes in AD. This is really helpful if know only someones last name (surname) or logon (samAccountName) and you want to search AD using one of those strings. While ANR serachs are a little slower than searching by a single attribute, performanes is still pretty good. I did two searchs using my last name against the Quest corporate AD and ANR took only slighlty longer than searching using wildcard alone.
Using the ANR search switch with the Quest Get-QADUser CMDLETS is simple:
Get-QADUser -anr Bobel
To search by Surname without using ANR is also pretty simple using wildecards
Get-QADUser -name *Bobel
Default attributes covered in an ANR search:
• GivenName
• Surname
• displayName
• LegacyExchangeDN
• msExchMailNickname
• RDN
• physicalDeliveryOfficeName
• proxyAddress
• sAMAccountName
To download the Quest AD CMDLETS for free go to http://www.quest.com/activeroles-server/arms.aspx.
To read more about ANR search in general see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/243299
