Active Directory, 5th Edition

Chapter 1. A Brief Introduction

Active Directory (AD) is Microsoft’s network operating system (NOS). Originally built on top of Windows 2000, AD has evolved over the course of more than a decade through multiple major Windows releases. This book covers Active Directory through the Windows Server 2012 release.

Active Directory 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.

This book is a comprehensive introduction to Active Directory with a broad scope. In the next few chapters, 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. Then we focus on various design issues and methodologies, to enable you to map your organization’s business requirements into your Active Directory infrastructure. Getting the design right the first time around is critical to a successful implementation, ...