Active Directory, 3rd Edition

Thinking of Changing the Schema

Before you start thinking of changing the schema, you need to consider not just the namespace, but also the data your Active Directory will hold. After all, if you know your data, you can decide what changes you want to make and whom those changes might impact.

Designing the Data

No matter how you migrated to Active Directory, at some point you'll need to determine exactly what data you will add or migrate for the objects you create. Will you use the physicalDeliveryOfficeName attribute of the user object? What about the telephonePager attribute? Do you want to merge the internal staff office location list and telephone database during the migration? What if you really need to know what languages each of your staff speaks or qualifications they hold? What about their shoe size, their shirt size, number of children, and whether they like animals? The point is that some of these already exist in the Active Directory schema and some don't. At some point, you need to design the actual data that you want to include. This is an important decision, since not all data should necessarily be added to Active Directory. While it may be nice to have shoe size in the directory, it may not make much business sense. You need to ask, "Is this data needed on all domain controllers for a given domain or all global catalogs in the forest?" Possibly an application partition, Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM ), or even a SQL Server database may be a better store ...