I recently came across NetWrix, a software company that specializes in system administration tools and utilities.  They seem to really have hit a niche that has been a pain point for many administrators over the years.  Whats even better is that NetWrix offers free versions of several of their products and not just limited evaluations either.

The tools that really caught my eye were their:

• Active Directory Change Reporter – this tool is great for environments with multiple administrators or environments that have delegated administration.  You get to see the before/after value of exactly what was changed and exactly who changed it.
• Inactive User Tracker – I would bet that nearly every Active Directory environment must have dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of accounts that haven’t been used for long periods of time.  This tool can help to identify these accounts and can even take action to eliminate those open risks.
• Password Expiration Notifer – I actually wrote an application one time that would pull the last change time stamp from Active Directory and send out an email notification to a user.  This solution does exactly the same thing only without code!  Very handy for users that may never get to a Windows based system where a password reminder is available (VPN, custom LDAP, portal, etc.).