Active Directory

Active DirectoryActive Directory is an implementation of LDAP directory services by Microsoft for use in Windows environments. Active Directory allows administrators to assign enterprise-wide policies, deploy programs to many computers, and apply critical updates to an entire organization. An Active Directory stores information and settings relating to an organization in a central, organized, accessible database. Active Directory networks can vary from a small installation with a few hundred objects, to a large installation with millions of objects.Active Directory is a directory service used to store information about the network resources across a domain.An Active Directory (AD) structure is a hierarchical framework of objects. The objects fall into three broad categories: resources (e.g. printers), services (e.g. e-mail) and users (accounts, or users and groups). The AD provides information on the objects, organizes the objects, controls access and sets security.Each object represents a single entity — whether a user, a computer, a printer, an application or a shared data source — and its attributes. Objects can also be containers of other objects. An object is uniquely identified by its name and has a set of attributes — the characteristics and information that the object can contain — defined by a schema, which also determines the kind of objects that can be stored in the AD.

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