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We have computers that are renamed every time a new employee shows up. This causes a lot of work unnecessary work for the IT department. Now while it isn't always true 100% of the time that each user MUST use the same computer all the time, it's good for us to know which machine a user is on in general.

So when using Active Directory to determine which machine a user is on most of the time, what property should I set?

I've looked and in computers and as far as I can tell, there is Owner and Description.

Description can only be searched for using the AD module for Powershell, and while Owner can be searched using the Find Computers dialog I don't actually know where to set it in the properties of a computer in Active Directory Users and Computers; I also don't know what other implications there might be for using the Owner property, or if it can be set using Powershell for a particular machine.

So what is the correct way to figure out what user is "assigned" to a machine without renaming the machines every time an employee is replaced?

leeand00
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  • I'm 99% sure *everything* in AD can be set and searched in Powershell, it's just some attributes/properties are easier to set than others. I haven't figured out a sure-fire way to do this myself, and at my last job we renamed computers, but it was cumbersome. I think you'll find updating AD constantly is less cumbersome but still not great. We currently have an almost-solution of using Spiceworks to scan the network and tell us who the last logged in user of a computer is. – Todd Wilcox Jun 09 '16 at 15:48
  • Yeah, but our Spiceworks machine is slow when it scans; it takes all day. – leeand00 Jun 09 '16 at 15:50
  • Yes, Spiceworks is not real-time, but you can go through the inventory of everything previously scanned while it is scanning. If you just added/changed a computer, you can scan that individual IP which takes just a couple minutes. Like I said, it's an almost-solution, but not perfect. SCCM might be better, but it's also way expensive (at least for our budget). – Todd Wilcox Jun 09 '16 at 15:53

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