How do I provide limited Active Directory access so that a Helpdesk tech can utilize it to perform basic functions?

This is a built in feature of Active Directory and is known as authority delegation. A good starting document is here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2007.02.activedirectory.aspx

Technet has a best practices guide and several more write-ups as well.

Yes, like Jeremy mentioned, the delegation wizard will help you out nicely.

There's a nice how-to to be found here: http://kpytko.pl/2012/05/16/active-directory-rights-delegation-overview/

However, always delegate rights to groups instead of individual users. Create a dedicated security group just for this particular rights delegation. It is much easier to manage those delegated rights by add/removing group membership than having to go back into the wizard or the security screen when you need make a change down the road.

Using a group makes the change more visible. No one would know a change has been made unless you go digging or have excellent documentation when making individual right changes to objects.

or


    Right Click on the OU that contains those users whose passwords you want to be reset
    Delegate Control
    Select the group/user you want to delegate rights to, Next.
    Select Create a custom task to delegate, Next.
    Select 'Only the following objects in the folder'
    Select 'User objects', Next.
    Unselect general
    Select property-specific
    Select read lockout time
    Select write lockout time
    Next, Finish.

Typically when providing delegated access to groups I would personally create a new OU called Delegation Task (or something meaningful) and put all of the groups in the OU. From there you can then restrict access to this OU so that modifications cannot be done by anyone without access.

Security groups should also have meaningful names as well some examples would be

AD_USER_MOD (group to modify AD User attributes)
AD_COMP_MOD (group to modify AD Computer attributes)
AD_PASS_RESET (group to reset passwords for user account)
etc...

This is totally optional and I just wanted to provide some insight that having a meaningful displayname is much nicer than filling out the "description", althought still a good practice to do both.

Will.

In addition you can also refer below KB link.

How to Delegate Basic Server Administration To Junior Administrators  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555986

The good way to do this is by creating an OU structure so that you can delegate permissions and GPOs separately to different objects of AD. Please check this link for more info.