Sebastopol, CA--When Microsoft introduced Windows 2000, the most important change was the inclusion of Active Directory. While it offers many great benefits, Active Directory has also proved to be a huge headache for network and system administrators to design, implement, and support. "To truly understand Active Directory, one needs to understand several technologies including LDAP, DNS, multi-master replication, the Schema, and GPOs, to name a few," says Robbie Allen, coauthor with Alistair G. Lowe-Norris of Active Directory, Second Edition (O'Reilly, US $44.95). "Although the MS documentation has gotten significantly better, it is more of a reference while our book is intended to be a guide to help the curious or weary understand the big picture."
The first edition of this book, "Windows 2000 Active Directory," helped many understand this technology. Now titled "Active Directory, Second Edition," the new version provides system and network administrators, IT professionals, technical project managers, and programmers with a clear, detailed look at Active Directory for both Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003.
The upgraded Active Directory that ships with Windows Server 2003 has more than one hundred new and enhanced features. In addition to the technical details for implementing Active Directory, several new chapters describe the features that have been updated or added in Windows Server 2003 along with coverage of new programmatic interfaces that are available to manage it.
"All of the existing chapters have been brought up-to-date with Windows Server 2003, and eight additional chapters have been added to explain new features or concepts not covered in the first edition," explain Allen and Lowe-Norris. "This second edition describes Active Directory in depth, but not in the traditional way of going through the graphical user interface screen by screen. Instead, the book sets out to tell administrators exactly how to design, manage, and maintain a small, medium, or enterprise Active Directory infrastructure."
To this end, the book has been divided into three sections. Part I introduces in general terms how Active Directory works, giving the reader a thorough grounding in its concepts. Part II covers the issues around properly designing the directory infrastructure, including designing the namespace, creating a site topology, designing group policies for locking down client settings, auditing, permissions, backup and recovery, and a look at Microsoft's future direction with Directory Services. Part III is about managing Active Directory via automation with Active Directory Service Interfaces (ADSI), ActiveX Data Objects (ADO), and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI).
"Active Directory, Second Edition" will help system and network administrators navigate their way through the maze of concepts, design issues, and scripting options in Active Directory, enabling them to get the get the most out of their deployment.
Additional Resources:
- Chapter 14, "Upgrading to Windows Server 2003"
- More information about the book, including Table of Contents, index, author bios, and samples
- A cover graphic in JPEG format
Active Directory, Second Edition
Robbie Allen and Alistair G. Lowe-Norris
ISBN 0-596-00466-4, 686 pages, $44.95 (US), $69.95 (CAN), 31.95 (UK)
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