Today in an Captaris Alchemy class I got an interesting question. One of the students has a customer who wants to use local users instead of domain users when setting up integrated security. Integrated security is where you can authorize users to view databases, folders, and/or files based on the username they are logged in as. Normally associating the database ‘roles’ with domain users makes the most sense, but occasionally there is a need to set up local users. Now the problem is that the Server Console UI doesn’t allow for anything other than domain users. So the only way to add a local user is through the Alchemy API. Before Powershell that would have probably meant breaking out Visual Studio. But now I think it is far easier to deal with. Here is a sample script that will take two parameters: a role name you want to add a user to, and a user name in the format servernameusername.

param($role=$(Throw "A role name is required..."),
    $user=$(Throw "A user name in the format SERVERNAMEUSER is required..."))
$alc = new-object -com auserver.application
$alc.connect()
$alc.addroleuser($role,$user)

If you name this script set-roleuser.ps1, then to add the user capabob to the sales role, just runset-roleuser sales capabob. That was easy.