Preface

Active Directory (AD) is an administration system for Windows administrators to automate network, security, and access management tasks in the Windows infrastructure. This second edition is updated to cover Windows Server 2022 and guides you through effective recipes for AD administration.

The book starts with a detailed focus on forests, domains, trusts, schemas, and partitions. After that, you'll learn how to manage domain controllers, organizational units (OUs), and default containers. You'll explore how to manage Active Directory sites, as well as identifying and solving replication problems. Later chapters cover different object types in Active Directory: users, groups, and computers. You'll also work through recipes that help you manage your AD domains, as well as managing user and group objects and computer accounts, expiring group memberships, and group managed service accounts (gMSAs) with PowerShell. This book discusses how to manage DNS and certificates and how to work with Group Policy. You'll then focus on security and federation before going on to explore Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) and how to integrate on-premises Active Directory with Azure AD. Finally, you'll discover how Microsoft Azure AD Connect synchronization works and how to harden Azure AD.

By the end of this book, you'll be able to make the most of Active Directory, Azure AD and Azure AD Connect.