Active Directory, 4th Edition

Chapter 1. A Brief Introduction

Active Directory (AD) is Microsoft’s network operating system (NOS), built on top of Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, and now Windows Server 2008. It enables administrators to manage enterprise-wide information efficiently from a central repository that can be globally distributed. Once information about users and groups, computers and printers, and applications and services has been added to Active Directory, it can be made available for use throughout the entire enterprise to as many or as few people as you like. The structure of the information can match the structure of your organization, and your users can query Active Directory to find the location of a printer or the email address of a colleague. With Organizational Units, you can delegate control and management of the data however you see fit. If you are like most organizations, you may have a significant amount of data (e.g., thousands of employees or computers). It may seem intimidating if you are faced with importing all of this data into Active Directory and managing it, but fortunately, Microsoft has some very robust yet easy-to-use Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to help facilitate programmatic data management.

This book is a comprehensive introduction to Active Directory with a broad scope. In Part I, we cover many of the basic concepts of Active Directory to give you a good grounding in some of the fundamentals that every administrator should understand. In Part II, we focus ...