Active Directory, 3rd Edition

Using ADAM

Now that you have an overview of what ADAM is, some of the differences, and how to install it, you are probably sitting there with an empty ADAM wondering, "What next?" This section will walk you through some common simple tasks, including creating an application partition and populating it with some data. These examples assume you have installed an ADAM instance with the MS-User.LDF and MS-UserProxy.LDF files. All of the examples will use LDIF files and ldifde.exe for making the updates because it is available with every server and requires no scripting knowledge. If you are familiar with scripting or other LDAP applications, they could be used as well.

Tip

If you prefer command-line tools over GUI based tools, point your web browser at http://www.joeware.net and download the ADMOD and ADFIND freeware utilities. These command-line tools are specifically optimized to work with Active Directory and ADAM and have several built-in capabilities that take advantage of special features that aren't available through ADSI.

Creating Application Partitions

Generally, the first thing you need to do with ADAM to add data to it is to create an application partition to house that data. If you had an application partition created during the instance install, then you don't have to worry about this step unless you would like to create an additional application partition within the same instance.

ADAM will allow you to use any container class as an application partition root. If you want ...