Active Directory is truly the heart of an organization. You might even say if a computer system were a human being it would be the brain spanning all knowledge of the system. It is a central repository for all data regarding users, groups, computers, printers, shared folders, contacts, and policies. This store all information into a database, also can be known as the hive. Which contains strings and strings of data, and meta data.

Many applications are written to connect to the Active Directory. This is useful because when you start to implement a system you can easily integrate it with authentication. If you are a authenticated user at a certain level you can restrict other users access to other resources. Such as you don’t want your Public Relations department to be able to have access to Human Resources files.

As a Systems Administrator or Network Administrator you can safeguard practically anything you chose. You can even specify in a group policy what programs you would want users to access or install. Let alone when a user signs on run a batch file or implement an import of internal resources of favorites into the users Internet Explorer. If you are just learning about Information Technology I would suggest you visit Microsoft’s website for a training guide. There you can also find resources such as a Virtual Machine to experiment with. You need to practice because this is something you will need to know.

– Harry Caskey