Hey, Scripting Guy! How can I check a computer and find out whether the Remote Desktop Users group has any members?

— ET

Hey, ET. Somewhat surprisingly, ADSI doesn’t have any sort of NumberOfMembers property, a property that could tell you – at a glance – how many members are in a group. But that’s all right, because we can simply iterate through the group’s membership and count the members as we go. Here’s a script that binds to the Remote Desktop Users group on the computer atl-ws-01 and then counts the number of users in that group:

strComputer = “atl-ws-01”

Set objGroup = GetObject(“WinNT://” & strComputer & “/Remote Desktop Users”)
i = 0
For Each objUser in objGroup.Members
    i = i + 1
Next
Wscript.Echo “Number of users in group: ” & i

If it’s not immediately clear to you, here’s how we count the number of members. We begin by setting a counter variable (i) to 0. We then use a For-Each loop to loop through the group membership. Each time we run through the loop, we increment the value of i by 1. Suppose we have 23 members in the group. In that case, we’ll run through the loop 23 times and – that’s right, at the end i will be equal to 23. We then echo the value of i (and, by extension, the number of members in the group).

But what if the group doesn’t have any members? In that case, we’ll never run through the For-Each loop, and the value of i will remain at 0. Thus we’ll end up echoing this message at the end of the script:

Number of users in group: 0

Of course, you didn’t necessarily want to know the exact number of members in the Remote Desktop Users group; you just wanted to know if the group had any members. So here’s a variation of the script. In this script, if we enter the For-Each loop (which we’ll enter only if the group has at least one member) we echo the fact that the group has at least one member and then quit. If we don’t enter the For-Each loop, then we echo the fact that the group doesn’t have any members. In other words:

strComputer = “atl-ws-01”

Set objGroup = GetObject(“WinNT://” & strComputer & “/Remote Desktop Users”)
For Each objUser in objGroup.Members
    Wscript.Echo “Remote Desktop Users has at least one member.”
    Wscript.Quit
Next
Wscript.Echo “Remote Desktop Users does not have any members.”