Microsoft Active Directory is one of the most popular directory services. As of November 2017, it was being used in 12.8 million organizations with 950 million users, as stated by Alex Simons, director of Program Management for the Microsoft Identity Division. Initially previewed in 1999, Active Directory (AD) became so ubiquitous that it was later a general term for other similar services.

If you are a beginner on your Active Directory (AD) learning journey, then you must have stumbled upon the term LDAP. It’s quite possible that you feel a little lost trying to understand this concept. The objective of this blog is to get you comfortable with LDAP and more confident about your AD learning journey. To begin with, let’s address the subject head-on! What is LDAP?

We have covered a plethora of topics on Active Directory (AD) in parts one to nine of this series on Active Directory Domain Services. In this final and 10th part, we will look at one other crucial aspect of AD—Group Policies and Group Policy Objects (GPOs). We will discuss what Group Policies are and what role GPOs play in the effective setup of any AD environment.

An Active Directory (AD) environment has things like forests, trees, domains, organization units, and objects. After growing acquainted with these concepts, the next step on this learning journey is to understand AD sites.

Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is a comprehensive cloud-based platform used around the world. It is an identity provider and access management service. If a company employs OneDrive, Skype, or Outlook, they are already using Azure in some capacity. Similarly, if a company uses Microsoft Teams or other applications in the Microsoft Office Suite, they are accessing them by logging into Azure AD.

In this article we will focus on how you can use Active Directory to schedule startup, shutdown, login or logout scripts on your managed desktops through ADsys. In this area, as well as for all the other new features delivered by ADsys, we tried to offer a user experience as close as possible to the native one available in Microsoft Windows, with the aim of enabling IT admins to reuse the same knowledge and tools they acquired over the years to manage Ubuntu desktops.

Virtual desktops solutions – including Spot PC, Windows 365 , Azure Virtual Desktop – rely on directory services to authenticate users and provide access to assigned resources. For many years, traditional Active Directory instances have provided these services. With modern cloud based virtual desktops this configuration has created complexity and challenges, most related to the fact that Active Directory originated on-premise and contained many configuration options over the years.

Linux Active Directory (AD) integration is historically one of the most requested functionalities by our corporate users, and with Ubuntu Desktop 22.04, we introduced ADsys, our new Active Directory client. This blog post is part 3 of a series where we will explore the new functionalities in more detail.

Linux Active Directory integration is one of the most popular and requested topics from both the community and our clients. On May 17 we delivered a webinar on the new AD integration features introduced with 22.04 (now available on demand) and following that we received an overwhelming number of questions. In this blog post we would like to address directly the most frequent ones

We’re excited to announce that we’ve recently contributed Active Directory Domain Services (abbreviated Active Directory DS) monitoring support to the OpenTelemetry collector. You can check it out here! You can utilize this receiver in conjunction with any OTel collector: including the contrib collector, the observIQ’s distribution of the collector, as well as Google’s Ops Agent, as a few examples.