Populate the Active Directory Description field
Tuesday, June 10, 2008 02:48 PM
Populating the Windows Active Directory Description field can be very useful as there are times when you need more information to correctly identify a system.
It's very handy to populate the Windows Active Directory Description field for computer accounts. Organizationally, you may use the field as an indicator for the system's role.
Even with a server nomenclature that is self-documenting, there may be times when you still need an additional piece of information to correctly identify a system when looking within Active Directory Users And Computers; the Description field is one way to address this need.
Descriptions can include server creation date, the server it is replacing, a special note on the system's configuration, or what domain roles are in use for domain controllers.
To determine which systems do not have the Description field populated, you can use a native query that can be run within Active Directory Users And Computers.
Click Saved Queries, click New, and then select Query. In the definition of the New Query, click the Define Query button to select the criteria. Click the Computers tab and, in the Description field, select the Has No Value option, and press OK.
Figure A shows the resulting configuration of the query definition.
Figure A
You can select the organizational unit (OU) that the query is run against to return the results of the queries, and the query will search the OUs contained within the selected destination. Querying a specified OU is important because, if the computer accounts of workstations and laptops are queried, this data may be overwhelming and not very useful.
If you can get into the habit of populating the Active Directory Description field, it will aid in many tasks where the computer accounts information is used. Configurations where the computer accounts are browsed, assigned for permissions, or configured for monitoring solutions that report on the system information by the description field benefit from the Description field clearly describing the system's role.
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