Issue and Manage TLS Server Certificates

Abstract

The first type of digital certificate we will be issuing with our new AD Certificate Services deployment is a TLS Server certificate. Many people are familiar with this kind of certificate, and they constitute the majority of certificates issued and sold by public CAs. They enable TLS on various kinds of servers, including HTTP, SMTP, IMAP, LDAP, etc. They also provide strong server to client authentication during a TLS connection. TLS Server certificates issued by public CAs are usually “public hierarchy”, which means most software already trusts them. The TLS Server certificates issued by AD Certificate Services are “private hierarchy”, which means you must install the CA certs associated with them on both the server and all client computers, before they are trusted. With AD Certificate Services, this process is mostly automatic, within the organization that deployed it.