14May Using Microsoft Visio to diagram Active Directory
ATDT ScreenshotThere seem to be a few people about asking how they can document their Active Directory or Exchange topology. There are 2 main ways and both are pretty obvious - either use your knowledge of the AD or Exchange topology to draw the diagram manually or use a plugin, utility or application to do it for you.
The manual way gives you more control over the placement of objects but you can see how manually drawing your chosen network, even using something like Microsoft Office Visio, could take a significant amount of time. This article will concentrate on using Visio but with the addition of a free plugin from Microsot called Active Directory Topology Diagrammer or ADTD.
This article will concentrate on using Visio with the most basic options of ADTD - after installing Visio you need to install the ADTD plugin by downloading it from the link above. If you want detailed, in-depth instructions on all the options contained within ADTD, please refer to the Microsoft ADTD Technet Blog.
After installation ADTD can be started by clicking the appropriate shortcut in the Windows Start menu on your machine. Enter the name of the Global Catalog (GC) server you want to connect and enter the name of the domain you want to draw below it. Select the options below as appropriate, depending on how far you want the AD discovery to extend. A sample screenshot is shown below.
When you’ve entered all required information it’s simply a case of clicking the “Discover!” button. If you’ve selected the option to count users per domain you will receive a message saying ADTD may become unresponsive during the discovery process. It’s safe to click OK when that message appears. Click the “Draw!” button when the discovery process completes and your active directory should be modeled in Microsoft Visio … feel free to change the grammatical and spelling errors that are produced by the application!
By default the resulting Visio diagram will be saved in your ‘My Documents’ folder (note that this location may have been changed by a network administrator). You can configure where the output is saved by changing the settings contained within the Tools | Options | File Locations tab.
