At work we have been getting more and more require for accounts that have users that are not ?full employee?s? (my term) These are users that do not spend most of their business time in the office, they could be travelling sales, outside sales, consultants. Some only use OWA,VPN, or Citrix desktop or published app. But they all seem to have one thing in comment. How do we let them know their password is going to expire and how to get them to change it.
Image: Francesco Marino / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
I started looked at ways to address the first issue this afternoon and I?ve found a few script that would send the emails and a few paid solutions.
The 2 vbs scripts I found are a few years old
http://theessentialexchange.com/blogs/michael/archive/2007/11/13/sending-an-e-mail-to-users-whose-password-is-about-to-expire.aspx
and
http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/rcrumbaker/archive/2008/08/15/email-users-when-password-is-about-to-expire.aspx
I also found an exe that you run via scheduled task
but I think I?m going to try the free solution from NetWrix, they also have a paid solution but I?ll start with the free version. Netwrix also has some AD change tracking I?m going to test but haven?t had time yet. They have some nice free tools with the option to go to the paid version with more features.
We haven?t totally collapsed our AD into a single domain yet, so I still have to deal with managing muliple AD domain name spaces in a single AD forest.
If you know of any other ways to notify the user they password will expire or have tested netwrix products leave a comment.
Thanks for testing our product. The free NetWrix Password Expiration Notifier is a popular solution because it does exactly what you described above: it checks all users whose passwords are about to expire and then sends notification E-mails to the appropriate account owners. NetWrix has a broad line of other freeware products, such as the Active Directory Change Reporter, USB Blocker and File Server Change Reporter, which we encourage you to take a look at. You can access all of our free tools at http://netwrix.com/freeware_products.html. Thanks again and keep up the good work.
Stephen Schimmel
Product Manager
NetWrix Corporation
http://www.netwrix.com
Thanks Stephen. Password expiration notifier is great.
I have a lot of the same types of accounts as well.
Three / four months back I adapted the script from: http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/scriptfanatic/archive/2009/08/02/sending-expiry-password-notifications-to-users.aspx and have been using it successfully ever since.
Best change was adding basic instructions to the auto email on howto change a password via OWA, and a summary of the password policy, change frequency, etc.