Active Directory, Second Edition

Chapter 1. A Brief Introduction

Active Directory (AD) is Microsoft’s network operating system (NOS) directory, built on top of Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003 . 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 network 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). This may seem daunting to enter in Active Directory, but fortunately Microsoft has some very robust yet easy-to-use Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to help facilitate data management programmatically.

This book is an introduction to Active Directory, but an introduction with a broad scope. In Part I, we cover many of the basic concepts within Active Directory to give you a good grounding in some of the fundamentals that every administrator should understand. In Part II, we focus on various design issues and methodologies, to enable you ...