Active Directory Collection

Source : Microsoft Technet
            Active Directory Collection : Active Directory

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Active Directory is typically used for one of three purposes:

• Internal directory. Used within the corporate network for publishing information about users and resources within the enterprise. A company’s internal directory may be accessible to employees when they are outside the company network using a secure connection such as a virtual private network (VPN) connection, but it is not accessible to non-employees.
  
• External directory. These are directories typically located on servers in the perimeter network or demilitarized zone (DMZ) at the boundary between the corporate local area network (LAN) and the public Internet. External directories are typically used to store information about customers, clients, and business partners who access external applications or services. They are also made available to customers, clients, and business partners to provide them with selected business information such as catalogs and so on.
  
• Application directory. Application directories store “private” directory data that is relevant only to the application in a local directory, perhaps on the same server as the application, without requiring any additional configuration to Active Directory. The personalization data, which is only interesting to the portal application and does not need to be widely replicated, can be stored solely in the directory associated with the application. This solution reduces replication traffic on the network between domain controllers.

Active Directory on a Windows Server 2003 Network

Active Directory is the information hub of the Windows Server 2003 operating system. The following figure shows Active Directory as the focal point of the Windows Server 2003 network used to manage identities and broker relationships between distributed resources so they can work together.

Active Directory on a Windows Server 2003 Network

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