Special Edition Using Microsoft Active Directory

Why a Directory?

The best analog example of a directory is a phone book. Years ago, a telephone user would pick up the phone, ring the central office, and ask for a particular person or number. This worked fine for small towns with a few phones, but the model failed to scale. We use DSs for the same reason we use a phone book. We cannot possibly remember all the information about every service we will ever need, and the information we had yesterday might not be timely.

Similarly, when our local area networks (LANs) held two or three servers and 100 clients, looking up services and other resources was not a difficult prospect. Now, however, with Enterprise wide area networks (WANs) that comprise thousands to millions of services and objects, a ...