AD and enforced password policies

["Jones, Barry" <BEJones () semprautilities com>]

Hello all. Happy New Year.

I have a requirement to enforce password policies on AD (a tacacs and windows domain). I don't have a great deal of 
Windows AD knowledge - so a newbie ;-) this is a little off topic, but I thought I'd ask...

Specifically, I need to enforce the use of length, special characters, and be able to validate the enforcement of such.

Looking at Nfront, Quest, etc..., and wanted to see if anyone out there had thoughts?

Thank you.