Exchange is not the only product that modifies the Active Directory schema. Many
products do, and this inherent ability to evolve is exactly what makes Active Directory
so flexible and scalable.
One critical aspect of Active Directory is that it is exposed via Lightweight
Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). As a functioning LDAP server, Active Directory
can interact with any LDAP-compliant application and can be interfaced with other
LDAP-compliant systems with relative ease. Although questions exist about Active
Directory??™s 100-percent compliance with the general LDAP specification, for many
administrators and developers, the interfaces available today make it much easier to
work with Active Directory as a directory service.
99 Chapter 4: Active Directory Domain Services
How Is Active Directory Organized?
When I talk about how Active Directory is organized, I am referring to its logical and physical
structures. Physically, Active Directory is stored in each domain controller as a set of
binary files that represent its underlying database. Logically, you can think of the internal
objects of Active Directory as nodes on a tree. This tree analogy lends itself well since
the smallest logical administrative boundary for Active Directory is the domain, and a
domain tree is a hierarchical collection of one or more domains. It??™s important to emphasize
one or more, since a tree with only one domain is still a tree, albeit with only one
node.
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