Microsoft® Windows Server® 2008: Implementation and Administration

Chapter 5. Policies and System Management

Each new version of Windows Server since Windows 2000 Server has shipped with Active Directory (AD). Active Directory, as you learned in the previous chapter, serves the same function for a domain as the Registry does for a computer. AD stores settings that can be applied to resources, and those settings affect the operation of software, hardware, network connections, access of security objects to these resources, and much more. AD is also an object-oriented database. When you want to manage and configure systems and users, you can apply a set of rules, called policies; when applied to groups, they are called Group Policies. Although Group Policies aren't applied to security objects directly, security ...