Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 Inside Out

Active Directory Improvements

Active Directory was introduced in Windows 2000, and for its second major implementation, it is a pretty decent directory service. In Windows Server 2003, you will find a number of welcome improvements. Before discussing them, however, I should mention that Active Directory is improved but not perfected. It still has its quirks and shortcomings, and it is still fairly inflexible, which will frustrate some users, to be certain. For example, there is no easy way to rearrange the structure of existing forests, merge one forest with another to form a single forest, or split domains off a forest to form a new forest. These ...