Chapter 13 - Working with Trusts and Organizational Units

Abstract

Organizational units (OUs) are container objects within the directory structure that can be used, as the name implies, to organize resources, including users, groups, and computers. Group policies can be applied to OUs, and administration of an OU can be delegated, making it easy to perform the tasks that need to apply to only select objects. While, Trust relationships define the ways in which users can access network resources across domains and forests. Without a trust between the domain to which a user belongs and the domain in which a resource resides, the user will not be able to access that file, folder, printer, or other resource. Two or more Active Directory domains are implicitly or explicitly connected using trust relationships. The authentication requests made from one domain to other domains use these relationships. The trusts provide a seamless coexistence of resources within the forest structure. Users are granted access to the resources in the other domain(s) after being authenticated in their own domain first. Once authenticated in their own domain, they can traverse the other domains to gain access to their resources.