The idea
Active Directory administration involves working with accounts, organizational units, and group memberships. For my SMCC capstone, I built a desktop interface that brought common user-management tasks together.
The application connected Python interface controls to PowerShell commands, giving those operations a visual workflow.
My contribution
I served as the sole developer of the application, writing the Python code from scratch without AI assistance. I built the interface and integrated the PowerShell calls that performed the Active Directory operations.
This project gave me experience connecting a front end to a real administrative environment and checking that the actions in the interface produced the expected results.
What it could do
Choose an organizational unit by its distinguished name and browse its users.
Add individual users, create users in bulk from a CSV file, and remove accounts.
View account details and group memberships, enable or disable accounts, change passwords, and require a password reset.
Add users to groups or remove existing group memberships from the profile view.
How I tested it
I tested ADUM against an Active Directory environment using multiple fresh virtual machines. We set up organizational units and exercised the application against the lab environment to check that it worked as intended.
This was a capstone tested in a lab environment, rather than a production deployment.
What I took from it
A useful interface has to connect clearly to the system underneath it. This project made that relationship concrete: a button in Python needed to result in the right account operation in Active Directory.
Testing on fresh VMs also gave me a way to check the application beyond the environment where I wrote it.
Why it matters
ADUM shows my foundation in programming and systems administration, alongside my interest in making technical tasks easier to carry out. It connects interface design with account management and repeatable procedures.
For IT security work, the relevant experience is with account status, password controls, and group membership. For business analysis, it is the process of turning a technical workflow into an interface someone can navigate.