Active Directory for Friday!

Well i'm back already minions!

This will 1 of 2 or 3 posts on AD today, depending on how I'm feeling but yeah, first upping.

In this post we're looking at OU's which are Organisational Units and these are logical containers. I hear you asking what the hell are those, Logical Containers are used within a domain to store objects so that they are in a convenient location for Administration and Access.

To access what you say? To access these i say (yeah I'm a little weird today but we're ignoring it because I'm in a good mood);

• Printers
• File Shares (folders on a network that store files people need to access)
• Users
• Applications

Given that AD is about the ease of maintaining network users, you want to be able to access these network resources easily in order to fix them quickly and efficiently. Say you've been assigned to a new project at work, you need to start right away. You don't want to be waiting around for hours for the AD admin to give you permission to the project folder. AD speeds up the process.

**BTW if your plotting/drawing your AD, triangles are for Domains and Circles for OU's

To clarify a few points - An object is ANY component in an AD environment

Anyway, in the previous AD post, i was going on about Schema which as i explained then, is pretty much a glossary of the objects, however what wasn't mentioned in the previous post is that the only people who can edit/modify the Schema are Schema Admins who are assigned upon the creation of the AD. They have specific privileges from being part of this group.

And to end this post, you may be wondering what is so great about AD since most help desk jobs ask for it, i certainly was, below are the 2 most important reasons people ask for it. Feel free to comment and i'll add your reasons.

• It allows better management of users through a centralized Database
• Its expandable: Its a solution that is as big or as small as your company needs, its perfect really because by its very design, it allows you to match it to your company needs.

Thats all for now, I'll check in later minions!