Why a custom application

The problem with commercial software to perform that same task is that there will be limitations to the level of customization. Building an application yourself based on your own script on the other hand, does not impose any limitations, as you can script any customization you might have in your organization the same way as when you are doing programming.

The example script below will send out an email to users who have password expiration in the near future. You could add valuable features to the script that applies to your company only, which could be:

• You only want to send a notification to a subset of users. The example script below looks at all users. To have it look at users only in a specific Organizational Unit, the collection AllUsers could simply be replaced by the UsersInOU collection. You could build additional logic to further filter the users to be notified, for instance based on other Active Directory attributes.
• You have a gateway to send an SMS to the end user's cellular phone and phone numbers are available in the Active Directory phone number attribute. In this case you could copy the custom command in the example and make a copy to send an SMS through the SMS gateway.
• When the password expiration gets below a certain threshold, for instance 2 days, you would like the to get an email yourself and/or have one sent to the Help Desk to proactively contact the user. This feature can be added by adding another UserPasswordExpiresSoon condition and email notification.
• You have populated a specific Active Directory attribute with the private email address of some users. If this attribute is not already mapped to a FastTrack function, the attribute name can be looked up in the "Attribute editor" tab of the user, which again can be fed to the UserCustomProperty function to get the actual value. Then an additional mail could be sent to this secondary email address.

If your company has problems with users that have prematurely expired accounts, the script presented here can easily be modified to send a reminder email to them that their account will expire soon. It would basically just require to replace the UserMustChangePasswordSoon condition with a UserExpiresSoon and then re-write the email body text. If the current body text is used as a template, the UserPasswordExpiryDate function must also be replaced with the UserPasswordDate function.

The script

The script listed is available directly in the script editor. Go to the "Documentation" tab, select "Password Expiry Notifier" under the "Insert Example Script" submenu.
Setting the variable "TestMode" to "True" means that the body of the email will simply be prompted out during execution instead of sending it as an email. This allows you to test how many users it will detect. If you have many users, the ShowMessage prompt could be replaced by an AppendFile command, to log who would have received an email.

The "ExpWarnDays" setting is the threshold in number of days of when users get the notification. The script will by default be in test mode, have a 7 day threshold and look at all users.

Compiling the script

To compile your script into a single executable custom application, open the script and go to the "Create Exe File" menu and select the "Save Script As Exe File" menu item - or press F10. Your script is now compiled into a single executable file. Remember to save a copy of the script, as the executable file cannot be reverse engineered into the original script. Please refer to this page for more information on pros and cons of custom applications versus executing the original script.

Executing the application

The executable file (or original script) must run once a day on a server. This can be achieved in two ways:

• Create a scheduled task and point to the exe file. The scheduled task handles the execution interval.
• Uncomment the script lines that include "SleepUntil" and "Restart" in the example and run the exe file.

Using a scheduled task would under normal circumstances be preferred, as it can be scheduled to run at system startup without logon.

Summary

Watch Senior Technical Writer Steve Dodson from Binary Research International walk you through the material presented on this page.