Book Image

Active Directory Administration Cookbook

By : Sander Berkouwer
Book Image

Active Directory Administration Cookbook

By: Sander Berkouwer

Overview of this book

Active Directory is an administration system for Windows administrators to automate network, security and access management tasks in the Windows infrastructure. This book starts off with a detailed focus on forests, domains, trusts, schemas and partitions. Next, you'll learn how to manage domain controllers, organizational units and the default containers. Going forward, you'll explore managing Active Directory sites as well as identifying and solving replication problems. The next set of chapters covers the different components of Active Directory and discusses the management of users, groups and computers. You'll also work through recipes that help you manage your Active Directory domains, manage user and group objects and computer accounts, expiring group memberships and group Managed Service Accounts (gMSAs) with PowerShell. You'll understand how to work with Group Policy and how to get the most out of it. The last set of chapters covers federation, security and monitoring. You will also learn about Azure Active Directory and how to integrate on-premises Active Directory with Azure AD. You'll discover how Azure AD Connect synchronization works, which will help you manage Azure AD. By the end of the book, you have learned about Active Directory and Azure AD in detail.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Managing Active Directory Users

Users and groups are, undeniably, the bread and butter of Active Directory. When there is something wrong, missing, or absent in these two object types, service desk personnel will be the first to know, because colleagues will ring the number for help. On the other hand, when an error is in a colleague's personal interest, due to lingering privileges or absent identity and access management processes, don't expect a call.

It's imperative to get users right. It is estimated that 20% of all IT costs in any organization is related to password resets and account lockouts. As colleagues use their accounts for authentication, any hiccup will inevitably result in loss of productivity.

A best practice is to cooperate with the Human Resources (HR) department for user creation and user expiration. HR people know when a contract is (to be) terminated...