Display Specifiers

Active Directory Display Specifiers

Display Specifiers is a Active Directory technology that allows for extensions of graphical Microsoft Active Directory Adminstrative tools such as Active Directory Users and Computers and Active Directory Sites and Services. Many Specopssoft products, e.g. Specops Gpupdate Professional, use Display Specifers to extend Microsoft Active Directory Users and Computers menus with new options and menus.

How Display Specifiers work

To use Display Specifiers to extend menus two things need to be in place, first the Display Specifiers need to be registered in Active Directory and then the application that actually extends the AD admin tool need to be installed on the computer where the actual extensions should take place.

Display Specifiers is registered in the DisplaySpecifiers container under the Configuration container of Active Directory, i.e. CN=DisplaySpecifiers,CN=Configuration,DC=contoso,DC=com. There is subcontainer for each language below this key that is used to to control the languages of for example ADUC that should be extended. Specops products extend all languages and add appropriate GUIDs for every language.

Specopssoft Display Specifiers

For each language the following Display Specifiers are added to five different objects

computer-Display with Display Specifier GUID {f27de543–395d-4151–8e7d-834f06200ae4}
user-Display with Display Specifier GUID {f27de543–395d-4151–8e7d-834f06200ae5}
organizationalUnit-Display with Display Specifier GUID {f27de543–395d-4151–8e7d-834f06200ae6}
group-Display with Display Specifier GUID {f27de543–395d-4151–8e7d-834f06200ae7}
domainDNS-Display with Display Specifier GUID {f27de543–395d-4151–8e7d-834f06200ae8}

A full path to for example the registration to extend Domain level objects in ADUC for US English is CN=domainDNS-Display,CN=409,CN=DisplaySpecifiers,CN=Configuration,DC=contoso,DC=com in the contoso.com forest. To verify that the Specopssoft GUIDs are registered open this object and check the property adminContextMenu, if the list contains {f27de543–395d-4151–8e7d-834f06200ae8} then the Specopssoft Display Specifiers have been registered. Normally a check like this is unneccessary since most Specopssoft Setup Assistants for products that utilize Display Specifiers will manage this automatically.