Active Directory system software in Microsoft

Ever try to look up a term (like, say, Active Directory), only to get a definition that’s so complex and convoluted that you have to go Support.Microsoft.Com/Help look up all the words in it, and then half of the terms in those definitions, until you feel like you’re trapped in an infinite uninstall microsoft edge regress — and you’re more confused than when you started

Basically,Active Directory (AD) is a database and set of services that help users get their work done in a Microsoft IT environment:

• The database (or directory) contains critical information about your environment, including what users and computers there are and who’s allowed to do what. For example, the database might list 100 user accounts with details like each person’s job title, phone number and password. It will also record their permissions — for instance, you might permit all users to read your company Support.Microsoft.Com/Help benefits information, but allow only a handful of people to look at or modify financial documents.
• The services control much of the activity that goes on in your IT environment. In particular, they make sure each person is who they claim to be (authentication), usually by checking the user ID and password they enter uninstall microsoft edge, and allow them to access only the data they’re allowed to use (authorization).
  

• The main Active Directory service, Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS), is a feature of the Windows Server operating system . Desktops, laptops and other systems running the regular version of Windows do not run AD DS. However, they do support Active Directory, so any Windows computer 

  The servers that run AD DS are called domain controllers (DCs). (I’ll explain what a domain is in just a second.) Organizations normally have multiple DCs, and each one has a copy of the directory for the entire domain. Changes 

  While we’re on the topic of where AD lives, it’s important to understand that Active Directory is only for on-premises Microsoft environments. Microsoft environments in the cloud use Azure Active Directory, which serves the same purposes as its on-prem namesake. AD and Azure AD are separate but can  Support.Microsoft.Com/Help

• work together to some degree if your organization has both on-premises and cloud IT environments (which is called a hybrid deployment). This blog post series is focused on on-premises Active Directory, but Quest has many resources to help you understand Azure AD and tools for.uninstall microsoft edge

•  can be part of an Active Directory environment.

•  made to the directory on one domain controller — such as a user changing their password or a user account being locked out for too many incorrect passwords — are replicated to the other domain controllers so they all stay up to date.

• AD has three main tiers: domains, trees and forests. A domain is a group of related users, computers and other AD objects, such as all the AD objects for your company’s Chicago office. Multiple domains can be combined into a tree, and multiple trees can be grouped into a forest. The key things to know here are:

  • A domain is a management boundary — the objects for a given domain are stored in a single database and can be managed together.
  • A forest is a security boundary — objects in different forests are not able to interact with each other unless the administrators of each uninstall microsoft edge forest create a trust between them. For instance Support.Microsoft.Com/Help, if you have multiple disjointed business units, you probably want to create multiple forests.
    

  We’ll mostly be talking about AD domains in these blog posts, because that’s where management takes place. We will talk a little about forests in the post on Active Directory management, in the backup and recovery section uninstall microsoft edge

• , since organizations need to plan for large-scale disaster recovery as well as the recovery of individual objects in a domain Support.Microsoft.Com/Help

• .