I posted this in the Servers forum, but no response yet. I’m looking for a programmatic solution, so I’m trying in this forum too:
I’ve done a little here and there as far as interfacing with Active Directory programmatically. I’ve gotten pretty used to querying information. But I’ve always wondered if there was a way to set a trigger in Active Directory. I’ll give you an example of what I am talking about.
We are going to a new Anti-Spam process that is offsite. Our email is routed through another companies servers, and they only send us the non-spam. One of the ‘settings’ that we will eventually turn on, will have that external company drop anything not going to a valid email address within our company. ie, if John Smith has jsmith@mycompanysdomain.com as his email address, but there is no johns@mycompanysdomain.com, this external server will simply drop any addresses that it doesn’t know are valid.
One method of doing this is to let that external company ‘query’ our Active Directory. Personally, I wouldn’t care about that, but my boss doesn’t want that. So, instead, we will have to add these users to that anti-spam system whenever we add a new email address to a user, or create a new user in AD that has an email address (we’re using Exchange 2003). If we create a user in AD, with a mailbox, they will NOT get any external emails until we (IT) update the anti-spam company with the new address (and user that has the address).
Now, I know how to do this programmatically, but not the way I’d like. I could build an NT Service in VB, that checks Active Directory for new email addresses (and address to account associations) periodically. If I build the ADSI query right, I could probably get away with doing this once a minute. But what I would LIKE to do, is just have Active Directory ‘alert’ my program when a new address (or a change) has occurred. A trigger. In SQL Server, I can write a trigger for changes in a table. Does Active Directory have anything like this? I use AD a lot, but I’ve never run across a capability like this before.
Thanks in Advance
