Pre-staging a computer account in Active Directory

Joining computers to your domain is going to be a very normal task for any IT professional, enough that you are probably familiar with the process of doing so. What you may not realize, though, is that when you join computers or servers to your domain, they get lumped automatically into a generic Computers OU inside AD. Sometimes, this doesn't present any problem at all and all of your machines can reside inside this Computers OU forever. Most of the time, however, organizations will set up policies that filter down into the Computers container automatically. When this is the case, these policies and settings will immediately apply to all the computers that you join to your domain. For a desktop computer, this might be desired behavior. When configuring a new server, though, this can present big problems.

Let's say you are interested in turning on a new web server that is going to be running IIS. You have a domain policy...