Creating a User Account in an Active Directory Environment

Hello everyone. :)

In this article I’ll walk you through how to create a user account (or accounts) in Active Directory.

Happy reading.

• To reach the Active Directory tab, simply click “Active Directory Users and Computers” under the Tools menu in the top-right corner.

• Another way to open Active Directory is to follow Start > Windows Administrative Tools > Active Directory Users and Computers.

• We’re first greeted by a screen like this one. Here you can see the domain name. As shown, this domain contains a number of folders. These folders are what I referred to in earlier articles as “Organizational Units.”
• As you can see here, our “Computers” folder doesn’t have any computers in it yet.

• Under the “Domain Controllers” folder of this domain, you can see a server I created earlier.

• Under the Users folder, you can see the users and groups laid out like this. You can tell users and groups apart by the little person icons next to them.
• You can also read their descriptions to get a better idea of what they do.

• Here, under the “Users” tab, we follow “right-click > new > user.”

• On this screen we enter the details of the user we want to create.

Here it asks us for a default password, which we enter. The options below have the following meanings:

1. User must change password at next logon: Use this option if you want the user to set their own password the first time they log in.
2. User cannot change password: Check this option if you never want the user to be able to change their password.
3. Password never expires: Check this option for cases where you don’t want the user’s password to expire.
4. Account is disabled: This option lets you disable the account.

• We click Finish to create the user.

• Here you can see that the user has been created.

When we right-click the user and choose “Properties,” we can assign the user additional information. Some of the attributes we can assign here are:

• First name: The user’s first name (must be at most 28 characters).
• Last name: The user’s last name (must be at most 29 characters).
• Display name: The name formed by combining the first and last name. This is the name that appears in the Active Directory listing.
• Description: The field where the user’s role, rank, etc. is described.
• Telephone number: The user’s phone number. I entered a random number here.
• E-mail: The user’s email address.
• Web page: The user’s website address should be entered here.

• Here you can see that the changes I made have been confirmed.

• Afterward, I created several more users. You’ll see why in my next articles.

Thanks for reading this far. :) See you in my next articles…