Active Directory helps you manage corporate identities, credentials, information protection, system and application settings through

the following technologies:

Active Directory Domain Services

Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS), formerly known as Active Directory Domain Services, is the central location for configuration information, authentication requests, and information about all of the objects that are stored within your forest. Using Active Directory, you can efficiently manage users, computers, groups, printers, applications, and other directory-enabled objects from one secure, centralized location.

Active Directory Rights Management Services

Your organizations intellectual property should be safe and highly secure. Active Directory Rights Management Services (AD RMS), a component of Windows Server 2008 R2, is available to help make sure that only those individuals who need to view a file can do so. AD RMS can protect a file by identifying the rights that a user has to the file. Rights can be configured to allow a user to open, modify, print, forward, or take other actions with the rightsmanaged information. With AD RMS, you can now safeguard data when it is distributed outside of your network.

Active Directory Federation Services

Active Directory Federation Services is a highly secure, highly extensible, and Internet-scalable identity access solution that allows organizations to authenticate users from partner organizations. Using AD FS in Windows Server 2008 R2, you can simply and very securely grant external users access to your organizations domain resources. AD FS can also simplify integration between untrusted resources and domain resources within your own organization.

Active Directory Certificate Services

Most organizations use certificates to prove the identity of users or computers, as well as to encrypt data during transmission across unsecured network connections. Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS) enhances security by binding the identity of a person, device, or service to their own private key. Storing the certificate and private key within Active Directory helps securely protect the identity, and Active Directory becomes the centralized location for retrieving the appropriate information when an application places a request.

Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services

Active Directory Lightweight Directory Service (AD LDS), formerly known as Active Directory Application Mode, can be used to provide directory services for directory-enabled applications. Rather than using your organizations AD DS database to store the directory-enabled application data, AD LDS can be used to store in its place. Two components work in conjunction to provide you a central location for security accounts (AD DS) and another location to support the application configuration and directory data (AD LDS). You can also reduce the overhead associated with Active Directory replication, without extending the Active Directory schema to support the application, and you can partition the directory structure so that the AD LDS service is only deployed to the servers that need to support the directoryenabled application.