Managing AD DS with Active Directory Administrative Center - Windows Server Tutorial

- Managing the active directory domain services environment is one of the most common tasks that many IT professionals will perform. So understanding what administration tools are available is really important. So I'd like to take an opportunity here to go through and demonstrate some of these tools that are available for managing active directory. Now, to do this, I want you to know I am connected to DC one. Okay. Which was our forest root domain controller but it really doesn't matter. You can do it on any domain controller. All right, and right here in the server manager, if I go to the upper right to the tools menu, you'll see here that there are a number of active directory related tools. Now, the one I want to show you in this video is the very first one the active directory administrative center. So I'll click on that and it opens into our active directory administrative center tool. Now the very first thing I want to mention about this tool is that it is a little bit different than pretty much most of the rest of the tools that I will show you. And the reason is because it's a newer tool and it was designed and built off of Windows powershell. What it's really doing is, is performing the functionality with Windows powershell so that you have that equal administrative functionality whether you're doing it through a script or whether you're doing it through this tool. Now, another thing I want you to notice about this tool is that just kind of the overall design and look of it. Okay. You may notice that this tool looks a lot like another tool that we've already seen in this course. And I will click back to that tool real quick. All right, and watch carefully Cause you may not even notice the screen change, but if I pop back over here to the server manager notice the similarity you have similar color coordination similarities were over on the left margin. Okay. We actually have our little navigation margin over there as well as some common tasks and things like that. All right, so let's jump back over to the active directory administrative center. Again, we have our navigation over on the left and we have some common tasks over on the right. All right, and so now another thing that I do want to mention about this particular tool is you would use this tool for basic functionality, doing things like managing users and groups and organizational units and stuff like that. But another thing that you can do is you can do things like create fine grained password policies or do things like enable the active directory recycle bin. Now these are things that in the past if you go all the way back before windows server, 2016 you know, you go all the way back to like server 2008 or before that those are things that you could only do through a command line based tool. Okay, and was a lot more difficult than this graphical tool that we have here. So there is a little bit of functionality that we have added to this particular tool. All right, so one other thing that I want to show you about this tool, again, I'm not going to go into too many of the very specific functions cause we'll get into that in other places. But over on the left we have our little navigation and you'll see here here's our landonhotel, that local domain. So if I click on that here, we can see the actual domain and we can see all the different containers that we have. All right So let's click on the user's container for instance. Now I want to show you something that happens when I go into the user's container. All right, so I click to go in there. First of all, I see all of the users and groups that are in that container, but something else that is happening, you may have noticed, it just popped up is over on the left, in that navigation pane, it'll actually remember the places that you've recently been to. Okay, so here we have that users container. All right, and let me go somewhere else. So let's go back to landonhotel.local and let's click on domain controllers. Here I can see my three domain controllers, DC, one, two and three Right. DC three being our read only domain controller. And again, you'll notice that over on the left, I now have a link for the domain controllers container. Now what's cool about this is how quickly and easily you can navigate to the places that you commonly go. So if I wanted to quickly get to my users container I don't have to go back to landonhotel or anywhere else. I can literally just click on users and it'll take me back to my users container. And if I want to get to my domain controllers, well I can quickly click on that link and jump to my domain controllers container. All right, so that is kind of the high level basics of what the active directory admin center looks like. And again, some of the specific functions, we'll save that for videos that are on how to do those specific functions. But you just need to know that this is how you navigate this particular tool.