Active directory who is online

Many IT admins wonder whether a free AD is really free and ultimately worth it. Microsoft has always been clever with licensing. Their goal has been to lock IT organizations into their products for the long term.

Microsoft, in turn, would make it advantageous to use as many of their tools as possible. Fifty-five percent of businesses are now Mac-friendly. Many would not. Mobile phones and tablets started to be ubiquitous. One of the most critical systems in an organization is its identity management platform or namely, Active Directory.

As the IT network changed, AD was under more pressure. It needed to manage cloud resources and mixed platform environments. The initial idea to solve this problem was to shift to an online Active Directory model — or an AD in the cloud. Of course more security and networking was needed, but since a dominant amount of IT resources were Windows-based the move still made sense. As Windows became only one in five devices though Forbes , the idea behind an online AD started to morph into the concept of a cloud identity management platform.

The idea would be to have a platform neutral cloud directory service that could work with on-prem, cloud, and remote resources. Mac and Linux devices would be first class citizens just like Windows was on AD.

The idea was to reimagine the concept of an online Active Directory to be more general — a cloud directory service. This approach created a tremendous number of benefits for IT admins and users alike. You could go through security event logs on DCs and find out info on users logging on but that is not going to be an easy.

If you are looking for something to track logon and logoff activity and what comptuer a user was using a simple login script may do the trick.

Take a look at this. As Mike has pointed out, AD does not have a built-in mechanism that would allow you which users are currently "logged on" - it simply registers the actual fact of authenticating the logon request and populates relevant AD attributes with this data.

You haven't mentioned the OS version before. I haven't tried it in a Windows Server based AD - so it's something you might want to evaluate yourself. Otherwise, you have a few other choices as described by Mike and me in earlier responses.

You might want to give a look to UserLock , a software solution that among numerous other features monitors user sessions in realtime on your Windows network who is connected, from which workstation s , for how long…. Office Office Exchange Server.