The temptation to use ADO directly is strong, but this technique bears several hidden costs. Besides the fact that using ADO directly from ASP requires that the developer know something about the internal layout of the data, the performance of such code degrades severely as the dataset size increases.
When the code was originally developed, the information requested was small and simple, and it was thought that this type of database access would be needed infrequently. However, as more records were added to the database, performance suffered.
This is not a type of access offered by the design of the CML application's COM components, such as User or Search. Adding this specific functionality to one of those components is well worth the development and testing effort. However, if a request is simple enough and rare enough, the overhead of invoking ADO directly from ASP may be appropriate.