Special Edition Using Microsoft Active Directory

Windows 2000 Active Directory

This book is about Windows 2000 Active Directory. Active Directory is a directory service (DS)—a distributed, hierarchical database of objects. Active Directory objects can be users, computers, groups, organizational units, domains, trees, and so on. In addition, Active Directory is fully extensible, and if it does not contain an object type you need, you can simply create one. Active Directory runs on Windows 2000 Domain Controllers and can be accessed by Windows 9x, NT, and 2000 clients. However, to fully take advantage of Active Directory, the client must be Windows 2000.

Active Directory is scalable. A single domain can hold millions of objects. Because it implements multimaster replication, almost any information ...