Windows 7 / Networking

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Searching the Domain

But when you're on a domain, this tool becomes far more powerful-and more interesting.

Top left: Searching for people in your network's Active Directory is like using a phone book. You supply the information you know about the person.

Lower right: When you find that person (technically, her user object), you can view the information stored in the user object's attributes. Of course, the usefulness of this feature depends on how much information your network administrators enter when creating the user objects.

When you choose Start → Network, the toolbar changes to include an option to Search Active Directory. Click it to open the dialog box.

The name of this dialog box depends on what you're looking for. Your choices are:

• Users, Contacts, and Groups. Use this option to search the network for a particular person or network group. If your search is successful, you can, for example, find out someone's telephone number, email address, or mailing address, or see what users belong to a particular group.
• Computers. This option helps you find a certain PC in the domain. It's of interest primarily to network administrators, because it lets them open a Computer Management window for the computer they find. It also lets them manage many of the PC's functions by remote control.
• Printers. In a large office, it's entirely possible that you might not know where you can find a printer with certain features-tabloid-size paper, for example, or double-sided printing. That's where this option comes in handy.
  Searching for a printer in Active Directory lets you find the printing features you need. Network administrators may also record the physical locations of the network printers. This way, when your search uncovers a printer that can handle executive paper and also print double-sided, you can simply look at its attributes to find out that it's located on the fourth floor of the building.
• Shared Folders. In theory, this option lets you search for shared folders on the domain's computers-but you'll quickly discover that searches for a certain shared folder generally come up empty-handed.
  That's because just sharing a folder on your computer doesn't "publish" it to Active Directory, which would make it available to this kind of search. Only network administrators can publish a shared folder in Active Directory.
• Organizational Units. You may not have heard of organizational units, but your network administrator lives and breathes them. (They're the building blocks of an Active Directory hierarchy.) You, the mere mortal, can safely ignore this search option.

To perform a custom search, use the dropdown menus to select an object type and then a particular field in that object. You then specify a condition (such as whether you want to search for an exact value or just the beginning or end of the value) and the value you want to look for. When you click Find Now, a list of the objects matching your criteria appears.