Active Directory

Abstract

Active Directory is a Directory Services solution developed by Microsoft. It is built using certain proprietary technologies, which only (currently) runs on the Microsoft Windows Server platform. Samba may soon turn out to be worthy of running in production as a Windows Active Directory replacement. While many of the back end components of Active Directory are designed for the windows client platform, Microsoft based much of the structure of Active Directory on open standards, such as the LDAP format known as RFC 2307 and the Kerberos v5 protocol defined in RFC 1510. Active Directory can be used to seamlessly integrate Windows systems en masse, but the real advantage of blending these technologies and open standards is that foreign operating systems can then be integrated with Active Directory as well.