Windows® 2000 Active Directory™

Active Directory Components

There are four principle components to an Active Directory design:

1. Forest

2. domain

3. organizational unit (OU)

4. site

Each design component builds on the others to produce the overall Active Directory design. For example, although the OU design and the domain design can account for the geographic needs and the administration needs of the organization, respectively, without a site design, a user, who needs to authenticate and access information from a remote office over a slow link, could suffer poor performance. In addition, if Active Directory domain, OU, and site designs are solid but the organization needs to replicate directory data to another subsidiary that needs to use a different namespace, Active Directory Forest ...