Active Directory for Not Yet Techies

Active Directory is the vast new improvement to networking software that makes Windows 2000 so much different and better than NT 4.0. The simplest way to describe Active Directory is that it's a database of all the objects within the network.

Windows 2000 Active Directory meet the X.500 Standard for global directories and supports LDAP - Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. It uses the multiple master model.

Win NT 4.0 organized things by physical hardware: this printer, that workstation, the server etc.

This seems to make obvious sense, but look at it this way: If you are one user on a network and you need to open up a certain word processing file, do you really care if it is stored on the hard drive of the PC you're using, your neighbor's hard drive or the server? Active Directory assumes you don't.

You just want that file. Active Directory gets it for you. While it must still be tied into particular hard drives, it looks for the file as the it, under word processing files of that type -- rather than your hard drive, then your neighbor's etc.

So it actually uses a more logical structure through function. To show the hierarchy, it uses a branching structure known as a tree. Not much different than what you're used to seeing when you look at your folders and their contents in Windows Explorer.

Since it can contain many separate trees, it can hold a forest.

It uses Domain Name Service (DNS) to code where information and files are stored, just as the Internet does.

Thus, Active Directory is one more step Microsoft is taking to totally integrating its technologies with the Internet.

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