Active Directory planning

[shred]

We are going to implement AD for two offices located in NC and SC. Each site will have about 150 users including the following departments: Customer Service, Accounting, Marketing, and IT. I'm new to this and I'm trying understand it! To keep the use of the WAN connection efficient, which Active Directory elements and structure would be best regarding the use of OU's, sites, trees and domains? Any information would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Chris

 

[GrnEyedLdy]

There are alot of things to take into consideration here...

What is the connectivity between the NC and SC locations.
Will you need different security policies for the NC and SC locations...some security policies can only be set at the domain, as domains act as security boundries.
What are your adminstrative needs...do you want centralized control of both NC and SC or would decentralized control work better for you....and on and on and on...:-D

For more detailed planning and deployment information, check out Chapter 9 of the Windows 2000 resource kit.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/tr...ndows2000serv/reskit/deploy/part3/chapt-9.asp

Have fun...

 

[shred]

There will be a T-1 connection between the offices. The security policies can be uniform for both sites. Each office has it's own IT department so mangement does not have to be centralized, but from administrative standpoint, what would be a typical implementation for a typical network of this type?

Thanks again!

 

[GrnEyedLdy]

If users at the NC office and those at the SC office require little interaction with each other and you would like to avoid heavy replication traffic, you can create a domain at each location. Alternately, you can create one Domain for the two locations and then control replication traffic between the two locations by establishing two sites (one for NC and one for SC) and scheduling when replication should occur.

I'm sure you already understand that the AD design process can be very complicated and some critical design decisions cannot be undone...

"Windows 2000 does not provide the ability to rename a domain in-place. Because the name of a domain is also representative of its position in a tree hierarchy, it is also true that a domain cannot be moved within a forest".

I highly recommend that you give chapter 9 in the resource kit a few minutes of your time, I'm sure it would help to answer alot of your questions.

Happy planning...

 

[shred]

Thanks for the input!

-Chris