[ Thanks to Joe
Topjian for this link. ]
“Active Directory is Microsoft’s answer to central
authentication and management. It provides organization of users,
computers, printers, and application data while also providing
authentication to these objects (when available).“Active Directory is based on LDAP–the Lightweight Directory
Access Protocol. LDAP stores objects in a tree-light hierarchy;
similar to todays filesystems. Each end node in LDAP is an object
while the container nodes are known as Organizational Units…”