Riordan Manufacturing Organization: A Case Study

The following proposal is for the implementation of Active Directory within the Riordan Manufacturing organization which includes plants in Michigan, Georgia, China and Headquarters in California. In the implementation of Active Directory, Riordan’s old domain will be replaced with Windows 2003 servers acting as domain controllers and running Active Directory Services at each of the above plants. This allows the network administrators at each Riordan plant to actively manage network resources. This proposal will provide a working definition of Microsoft Active Directory and the benefits it will provide to Riordan Manufacturing.
An Active Directory (AD) structure is a hierarchical framework of objects. The objects fall into three broad categories such as resources which include printers, services which include email, and users which include user accounts and groups. The Active Directory provides information on the objects, organizes the objects, controls access and sets security. Active Directory is designed to play many different roles within an organization. The roles range from managing Windows networks to managing directory enabled applications. Active Directory empowers organizations to centralize their directory management in a more streamlined,
powerful and flexible manner.
The Schema defines definition of all object classes, and attributes that make up those object classes, that can be stored in the directory.
The schema itself is stored in the directory in the schema partition in the directory and is replicated among all the domain controllers in the forest. This way, any change that is made to the schema is replicated to every domain controller in the forest. An Active Directory structure is hierarchical in nature and its objects fall within the categories of resources, services and users and stores information and settings in a central database. Active Directory can also be used to assign policies, deploy software, and apply critical updates to an organization or enterprise
level.
Now that Schema and Active Directory have been put into simple terms, a basic understanding of Forest, Domains and Operational Units can be explained. A Forest is a collection of Domains and a domain is a collection of Operational Units. The structure begins with the Forest. A Forest is a collection of one or more domains that are organized as peers and connected by trusted relationships. All resources in a Forest trust each other, no matter where they are located in the Forest. The next part of the structure is the Domain. This is a networked set of resources that can be administered as a group. These resources will share security principals and other objects that are administered collectively. A Domain can represent a group of users and computers that are located at a single physical location or it can represent all users and computers across many locations. The Organizational Unit is designed to hold objects and even other Organizational Units, but has no functionality on its own. The purpose of an Organizational Unit is to simply hold other objects. The Organizational Unit is very helpful when the time comes to organize the directory structure. This is the point where it can make the structure mimic the organization. Organizational units can be comprised of people and machines. Inside any particular Organizational Unit can reside very specific groups like Legal, Security, Finance, HR, etc.
Michigan, Georgia, China and Headquarters in California sub-domains will contain all of the Organizational Units and physical resources, such as computers and other such related equipment in their respective domains. Trust relationships will be structured where one-way trusts will exist from each resource domain, trusting the Corporate domain. These one-way trust relationships will allow the systems administrator to add the appropriate Global Groups in the Corporate domain, to their respective Local Groups in the resource domains. This will allow appropriate access to such things as server shares and printing to network printers. There will also be a Corporate domain controller at each of the plants that will allow users at each plant to log-on and authenticate to the nearest domain controller at their location. The systems administrator can use Group Policies in Active Directory to define settings for users and computers throughout a network. These settings are configured and stored in what are called Group Policy Objects (GPOs), which are then associated with Active Directory objects, including domains and sites. The systems administrator can administer Group Policy Objects on the Corporate domain, since that is where the Global User Group’s are contained. Through Group Policy Objects, administrators can globally configure desktop settings on user’s computers, restrict or allow access to certain files and folders within a network. Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM) is a light-weight implementation of Active Directory. The Corporate System Administrator can, if he she chooses to, control and minister any of the above domains with this tool and is capable of running as a service, on computers running MS Windows Server 2003 or Windows XP. Active Directory Application Mode provides the same functionality as Active Directory, but does not require the creation of domains or domain controllers. In conclusion Riordan will benefit greatly from the added functionality, security and ease of use that Active Directory will provide to its organization.