Active Directory.

Can someone give me the simple explaination of what Active Directory is and what it does?

Greg

 

Microsoft does just that in this Active Directory Overview. This is a fairly non-technical look at the whole thing although written strictly with 2000 in mind since it was published well before 2003 became available.

 

It makes networking small businesses more complicated than it needs to be!

 

Its Great!

Active Directory or AD for short is great. It allows you to give each user a username/password, and then you have the ability to setup their privilages by setting up groups. I would def. take a look and check it out. It has so many benifits!

Kev

 

My comment was made with tongue in cheek. However, on reading Kev's comment, I think my comment could be miss-interpreted as meaning a server controlled network log in system is over-complex for a small business, which I did not mean.

To describe AD as simply a method of centrally managing usernames and passwords, is doing the system a grave injustice.

AD is a hugely powerful concept that allows you to centrally manage all manner of user information and to provide interfaces into applications that can use this infomation. Probably the best example of such an interaction is between Exchange (Microsoft's flagship e-mail server - perhaps nowadays communication server is a better name) and AD. AD also provides a structured system for organising and managing users in a large network.

For medium to large companies, with users spread over many offices, factory units and shops, AD allows the system Administrator a great deal of flexibility in grouping and arranging user resources. It's hierarchical structure is ideally suited to this environment.

My original comment came from an observation that this power and inherent complexity is also AD's weakness. The truth of the matter is that if you have an Office of 30 users the benefits of a heirarchical structure are limited. A simple Domain structure (Microsoft's previous server controlled network log in system) will give you the centrally managed user/password system without AD's complexity.

Probably AD's main headache for a small network is the difficulty of backing up and restoring. Recovering a damaged Active Directory can be a real head ache.

However, such comments are acedemic. Anyone installing a new Microsoft network is going to use a 2000 or 2003 server and Active Directory. Not to do so (or use an alternative network server system such as Novell Netware) on anything larger than a 5 user network would be a mistake I believe. However, that doesn't stop me missing the simplicity of the NT4 domain model when contemplating small (less than 50 users), single site networks.