Creating a certificate template to prepare for issuing machine certificates to your clients

This recipe is the first hurdle that many new certificate admins bump into. You may have a CA server up and running, but what's next? Before you can start granting certificates to computers and users, you need to establish certificate templates that you are going to publish. You will configure these templates with particular settings, and when a certificate is requested against the template, that new certificate will be built based on the information in the template combined with the information provided by the certificate requestor.

There are some built-in certificate templates that preinstall when you add the CA role to your server. Some companies utilize these built-in templates for issuing certificates, but it is a better practice to create your own templates. There is no need to start from scratch, though. You can take one of the built-in templates, find one that comes close to meeting your...