User Management

In this section, we take many of the abstract concepts we learned in the first part of the book and begin to apply them to real-world problems. One of the most common programming activities that most developers will perform against Active Directory and ADAM is user account management.

Active Directory user management is fairly straightforward once we know all of the basic rules. However, there are many interesting rules and behaviors concerning how attribute values in Active Directory are used to determine how user objects behave in Windows. In order to get the results we want, it is important to learn these rules and behaviors. We try to demonstrate most of them in this chapter.

To a lesser extent, we also investigate user account management in ADAM. ADAM is very similar to Active Directory in most respects, but it has a few significant differences worth pointing out.