To remove a protected OU, go to ADUC (Active Directory Users and Computers), select the domain and enable “Advanced Features” in View. When Advanced Features are enabled, just right click you OU go to Properties -> Object and uncheck “Protect against accidential deletion”. Disable Advanced Features after that. By the way. When Advanced Features are enabled you can even see the distinguished Name of objects directly in ADUC UI.

Want to create some organizational structure in AD, I suppose it is specifically useful in a development environment, well the best solution is powershell then. Mastering Powershell by and Powershell.nu by Niklas Goude provide examples how to do this. $domain = \[ADSI\]"" $ou = $domain.Create("organizationalUnit", "OU=Administration") $ou.SetInfo() ```Be sure you write "organizationalUnit" in lower case. Otherwise you'll get "Exception calling "SetInfo" with "0" argument(s): "The specified directory service attribute or value does not exist" when you invoke **$ou.

While working with Active Directory within SharePoint we probably don’t need to specify the domain or the root container. We can the current values. Here is a simple method from a console application just to demonstrate: internal static void GetDomain() { var context = new DirectoryContext(DirectoryContextType.Domain); var domain = Domain.GetDomain(context); Console.WriteLine("Full domain:"); Console.WriteLine(domain.Name); //takana.local Console.WriteLine(); Console.WriteLine("root container"); var parts = domain.Name.Split(new\[\] {"."}, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries); var dcParts = parts.Select(n => "dc=" + n).

To get all users from an AD group is very simple: groupName = "an\_ad\_group"; PrincipalContext ctx = new PrincipalContext(ContextType.Domain); GroupPrincipal grp = GroupPrincipal.FindByIdentity(ctx, IdentityType.Name, groupName); var principals = grp.GetMembers(true); ```But what about an OU? There is no OrganizationUnitPrincipal... [Well, there is a solution: to instantiate a context for your OU](http://stackoverflow.com/a/1927476/632117 "See the solution on Stack Overflow"): So if you want to check if a user in a OU: internal static bool IsUserInOu(string ou, string name) { var domain = “takana.

A tip for all who want to administer AD with powershell: Idera Powershell scripts. Just sign up and get the free scripts for AD, SQL, Exchange and Sharepoint. I personally prefer to user modules, so I change the file extension from ps1 to psm1 and then I can use import functions as modules. Here is a simple example for creating for domain users: import-module .\\New-IADUser1.psm1 function Add-User($name) { New-IADUser -Name $name -sAMAccountname $name -ParentContainer 'CN=Users, DC=contoso, DC=com' -Password 'SvenskaAkademien1786' -EnableAccount -PasswordNeverExpires } Add-User "user01" Add-User "user02" Add-User "user03" Add-User "user04" update 2012-03-15: nice script from Ryan Ryan Dennis has created a very handy script for creating random users.

To get the distinguished name for a user, it isn’t enough to get an SPUser object. The distinguished name is the unique string for identifying a user in Active Directory (eg. CN=BeforeDAfter,OU=Test,DC=North America,DC=Fabrikam,DC=COM) Even using UserProfile object is not that clear. The distinguished name can be found in a property which can be retrieved with brackets: up[PropertyConstants.DistinguishedName] public static string GetDistinguishedName(string login) { var dn = ""; UserProfile up; using (var site = new SPSite("http://dev")) { var serviceContext = SPServiceContext.

Here is a a link you can start with. To test AD, install AD. Then we canplay with it. Take a look those examples, too. PrincipalSearcher vs. DirectorySearcher What is the difference? OU Here are two examples (one for PrincipalSearcher and the other for DirectorySearcher) to retrieve users from an OU: //PrincipalSearcher internal static void ListPrincipalsFromOu() { using(var ctx = new PrincipalContext(ContextType.Domain, "takana.local", "OU=SOME\_OU ,DC=takana, DC=local")) { using (var up = new UserPrincipal(ctx)) { using (var ps = new PrincipalSearcher(up)) { using (var res = ps.