Access Denied: Using the MMC Active Directory Users and Computers Snap-In to List Users in Your Domain

I often find browsing through the organizational unit (OU) tree to examine user accounts impractical. Can I use the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) Active Directory Users and Computers snap-in to get a complete list of all the users in my domain regardless of the OU structure?

Yes. From the snap-in console, select ActionFind, then select the Advanced tab. Use the In drop-down list to select your domain. Next, select User from the Field menu and select Logon Name. Change the condition to Present, click Add, then click Find Now. Windows 2000 will populate the object list with all the user objects in your domain. FieldUserLogon Name works because only user objects have a User Logon Name, and—because the User Logon Name is required—it's always present. To see all users in the entire forest, select Entire Directory from the In drop-down list and click Find Now. Be careful, however: This choice can involve a lot of users.

You can double-click any user in the list to view user-account properties the same way you would in the main window of the Active Directory Users and Computers snap-in. You can click a column heading to sort by any column in the list. You can use ViewChoose Columns to add other properties to the object list for sorting. You can also use FieldGroupName to obtain a list of all groups. To further filter the objects in a list, you can activate ViewFilter, which lets you create filters on any of the columns in the list by using criteria such as Contains, Starts With, and Ends With.