Group Management

Security and distribution groups play an important role in managing objects within any Active Directory and ADAM installation. While security groups are critical to Windows resources that are managed by access control lists (ACLs), it is not uncommon to use security groups as a basis for authorization roles within our own applications as well. As such, creating and managing security groups within Active Directory and ADAM becomes important from beyond the simple administrative detail of placing a user into a specific group. We often need to automate the management of group membership from within the application to drive the functionality. This chapter deals with the most common tasks for managing groups and their memberships. We will be building on the techniques and concepts presented in the first sections of this book to apply them to real-world tasks and scenarios.

We will start by looking at how we can create security groups, and then how we add and remove users from them. Finally, we will wrap up with how we can inspect groups to determine their membership, including both normal groups and primary groups.