Item: ManageEngine ADManager Plus
Rating: 7
Author: Joe Perri

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

ADManager Plus is being used across multiple teams in IT. We are also using it to run some automations to upkeep distribution lists. It is a very powerful reporting tool for Active Directory and also for bulk creations or modifications needed to be made in your environment. If you have a team managing AD that isn't great with PowerShell, ADManager can help fill that gap!

Pros and Cons

Running reports.
Making bulk modifications to your AD environment.

Reports can be hard to get what you need...sometimes they include fields that you don't need.
The automation feature broke after an update and our complex automations stopped working.

Return on Investment

It has helped reduce the number of tickets worked by our AD management team.
It has allowed other teams to control their own AD security groups, taking the AD management team out of the middle causing faster response times for our customers.

Alternatives Considered

My company already owned ADManager when I started with them. If I remember correctly, it was chosen because it is a fairly cheap tool and because we also use Manage Engine's Service Desk Plus application. ADManager's main competitor (in my eyes) would be PowerShell, now that I have become more proficient with scripting it is rare that I use ADManager except to create users using one of the templates we created. The standardization you get with the templates is really great, it could also be done using an XML file and PowerShell, but why fix what isn't broken?

Support Rating

This is one of their lacking points... Every time I have needed support the first thing they want to see is our log files. And then it can take days or weeks to hear back from them and sometimes you have to follow up yourself or they will just close your request. If you can actually get someone on the phone or a sessions scheduled to troubleshoot, sometimes you'll be lucky enough to solve your problem. We used to have a major new hire automation running in ADManager and it broke after updating the software. We went back and forth with them for a month or so and they were not able to resolve the issue, I ended up writing a PowerShell script and scheduling it to do the work that was being done before. This also allowed me to make the automation better than ADManager allowed.

Key Insights

Do you think ManageEngine ADManager Plus delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with ManageEngine ADManager Plus's feature set?

Yes

Did ManageEngine ADManager Plus live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of ManageEngine ADManager Plus go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy ManageEngine ADManager Plus again?

Yes

Other Software Used

ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus

Likelihood to Recommend

ADManager is great for assisting your Active Directory support team with reports, bulk creation or modifications, and simple automations. It takes the PowerShell coding out of managing Active Directory and allows your team to build some automated tasks without needing to code. If you want to write complex automations it doesn't work very well. It is also a great tool to grant other IT teams access to manage a subset of AD groups, users, or even attributes.

AD Management Made Easy!

Overall Satisfaction with ADManager Plus