ADTD Not Drawing Exchange Organization

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Background

The Active Directory Topology Diagrammer (ADTD), also previously called ADMap, is a downloadable tool from Microsoft that can read information about Active Directory as well as Exchange from your AD and then using Visio draw a representation of your organization. 

Issue

Recently, I ran into an issue with the ADTD tool at a customer site whereby the ability to draw their Exchange Organization was not available. 

After installing the ADTD tool and running it, we :

  1. Enteried the name of a GC in the Server/Domain box
  2. Clicked on the Exchange tab 
  3. Selected the options we wanted for drawing the Exchange Organization
  4. Clicked the “Discover!” button.

When the Discovery process completed, it had unchecked the “Draw Exchange Organization” option and grayed it out as shown here:

This meant I could NOT recheck the option and when I clicked on "Draw!" it did NOT draw the Exchange environment.

This can happen if the account being used does not have rights to read the Exchange Organization information out of Active Directory, but in our case, we were using an Exchange Administration account that had full rights.  So, that was not the problem.  We started trying all kinds of different things to try and get it to work to no avail.  When we were just about to give up, we stumbled onto the solution.  We were running it from a Windows 7 workstation (normally, I've run it from a Windows server OS) and the User Account Control (UAC) was getting in the way.  We had NOT launched the tool using the "Run as Administrator" option.

Solution 

As mentioned above, the issue turned out to be UAC.  To get ADTD to use the proper credentials and retrieve the Exchange Organization information out of AD, we right-clicked on the Active Directory Topology Diagrammer item in the Programs menu and selected “Run as Administrator”.  After doing this, the “Draw Exchange Organization” option stayed checked and the Exchange Organization diagram was able to be generated.

While not a major issue, I had not found anyone else who had run into this so wanted to publish this information out in case anyone else should ever run into this problem.