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,
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