Active Directory Cookbook, 3rd Edition

Chapter 18. Active Directory Application Mode and Active Directory Lightweight Directory Service

18.0. Introduction

Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM) was released in November 2003 on the Microsoft website. ADAM is a lightweight LDAP platform that allows developers and administrators to work with AD objects such as users, groups, and organizational units, without worrying about the overhead of running a full-blown copy of the Active Directory directory service. ADAM can run on Windows XP or Windows 2003 computers, and you can run multiple instances of ADAM on a single machine. Because ADAM runs as a standalone service, you can start, stop, install, or remove ADAM instances without affecting or interfering with any underlying AD infrastructure. ADAM can leverage domain authentication, local machine users and groups, or it can authenticate users based on security principals that you’ve created within ADAM itself. (It’s important to note that these are separate from Active Directory security principals, which cannot be created within an ADAM instance.) ADAM can also be used to replicate data between non-domain-joined computers such as ISA configuration between a farm of ISA 2004 servers configured as a workgroup.

With the release of Windows Server 2008, along with several other technologies, Microsoft renamed ADAM. The new name for ADAM is Active Directory Lightweight Directory Service (AD LDS). (Except where explicitly mentioned, the names ADAM and AD LDS will be used interchangeably.) ...