Active Directory & Physical Business Structure

in today's video we are going to be talking about active directory structure if you watched our previous video we did slightly touch on the subject but in this video i wanted to get a little bit more in depth with you guys so that we can actually kind of simulate what an active directory structure might look like with somewhat of a real world type of business that way you can kind of visualize you know what your directory looks like versus what your actual physical environment looks like and when we say what our actual physical environment looks like this means where our actual departments lie in that organization so if you walk into a building you might run across you know a secretary's desk and then you might have a bunch of other offices in that building so you might have like your hr office you might have a sales office you might have an it office now let's simulate this in active directory and talk about this so that way hopefully when you are going through active directory or stepping into an environment you can also visualize your structure in active directory and then you can kind of relate that directly to the physical setup in that environment so let's jump right over to our active directory screen if you guys haven't pulled this up go ahead and spin up your server and go ahead and open up active directory users and computers now in our last video we talked about keeping our active directory structure very minimal we only want a few different ou folders in our structure because it makes things a little bit easier to manage in group policy however there's been plenty of environments that i've stepped into that have had many you know sub ou's and it's maybe a little bit more difficult to organize it's maybe a little bit different or difficult to really have a good stranglehold i guess on that structure especially when you're utilizing group policy but it's still doable we can still do it it's just you know we have to maybe jump a few extra steps to do uh some different things in group policy but that's it's not that big of a deal so let's create our new structure here and we're going to be utilizing a new business so what we're going to do i'll put business here on the screen we got business and now what we're going to do in active directory is go ahead and create a new ou organizational unit right under itc q.local so right under your domain we're going to go ahead and create a new ou and we're just going to call this ou underscore production so if we the reason why i put underscore and this is like a hierarchy thing with uh with folders and stuff especially um you will you guys are going to notice that uh anything that has an underscore in front of it is listed first in a directory then that's the same thing here with active directory if we put an underscore there it's going to be the first thing listed right under itcq.local after we did a right click and refreshed on our domain there so now we have production so let's say for instance that our business is uh located in the sears tower or if you're you know new here it's the willis tower but it will always be the sears tower to me it's in chicago it was one of the largest buildings in the world for a really long time not anymore but it's still a landmark if you will in chicago where i'm from at our business in the sears tower we actually have two floors we rented out two floors for our business and we're going to say that we do like sales and engineering or something so what we're going to do is put on here our first floor and our second floor so we know we have two floors to manage in active directory now we could actually go under production and we're going to right click and we are going to create a new ou and if you know what that new ou is going to be good for you it's going to be first floor and then we're going to create a second ou and you should probably know what that is because it's the second floor so now in active directory we have it structured out for our first floor and second floor because again we're renting out two floors in the sears tower so now we can visualize an active directory okay well we got our first floor and second floor well what departments do we have right so for the sake of this video i'm going to go ahead and list our departments here we have hr which is human resources we have i.t we have sales and we have support and we have our management or our vps so we have hr it sales support and our vps in our organization so what we can do in active directory is actually create ou's for all of these departments so what we're going to do is say okay our hr department could be on our first floor now this is obviously going to make sense when you actually have your physical structure laid out ahead of you so we're kind of making this up as we go and we're saying that our hr department is on the first floor so we're going to create a new ou under our first floor and call it hr we also know that on our first floor we have our vps so we can put vps or vp or you could put management let's just put management because the same thing and now we can see on our second floor well that's where our sales team is so we can put sales and with our sales team of course it's probably a good idea to have our support team because your support team will often be working with our sales team so we could put on here support and then of course on our second floor you probably want to have your it team kind of close to everybody else so they can help them so we're going to put it so now we have our structure laid out ahead of us we have on our first floor we have hr we have management on our first floor on our second floor we have sales support and i.t so this if you visualize if we walked into the sears tower and went to the floor where we're rending out space as soon as we get to our first floor of our business we know that we're going to find our hr department there and we're going to find our management department there now we did mention before we might have you know a secretary desk so on our first floor we can actually even put a new ou for our secretary we could call this reception there we go now we have our full structure laid out ahead of us and now what we can do is actually start putting our users into these different ou's into these different departments so we can go down to our users and we can drill down in here and we can say all right well uh does bailey barbara barry and barrett they're all part of our hr team so what we can do we can highlight all of them i'm just holding down control and clicking on all of them and i'm just going to drag them over to hr then we're going to hit yes so when we go under production we have no users when we go under first floor we have no users but when we go under hr we have our users that we just moved there so that's kind of a way that you can move your users around we can try to simulate this process right so let's go back to users and let's say oh grant um there's a lot of crazy names here casey and kareem they are all part of management so we can move them over to management so now under first floor we have hr we have our users in hr and we have our users in management now we can keep repeating this process and we can start moving all of our users to the correct departments now why we do this why we have it structured this way there's many things that we can do with group policy i know we haven't gotten to group policy yet but it's a very important piece of our entire puzzle here in future videos we will be covering group policy so all of this makes a little bit more sense but i can kind of give you a scenario here that hopefully you can understand just by me explaining it to you with our hierarchy of our folders here in production we could push out a group policy and group policy is something that really helps manage not only our users but it can help manage our groups it can help manage settings within our environment so with production let's say for instance we had a specific uh wallpaper that we wanted to push out and this is actually very prevalent throughout the industry we might have just a specific wallpaper that we push out to every single computer in our environment so under production we can actually create a group policy that pushes out a specific wallpaper to all of our users under production so anybody who's on the first floor in hr management reception they'll also receive the same wallpaper and the same with the second floor but let's say for instance well our it team since you know it can essentially do not whatever they want but they can do whatever they want sometimes with um the way that we push things out or the settings that we have it is completely separate beast from everybody else but we still want to have the same group policy settings pushed down to us but we can also modify that so as we said we have this wallpaper pushed down to everybody well i could just go to it in group policy and push out a specific wallpaper to the it team so every other department will get a standard wallpaper pushed out but it could have a separate wallpaper pushed out now this was just a really brief basic example of how hierarchy and group policy and active directory work together as we get into the videos it'll definitely make more sense because we will be pushing out different group policies for different ous and different users and different security groups and such so it's going to be really exciting once we get to that point but i just kind of wanted to explain this process to you guys in a way that we could kind of simulate it and visualize a physical environment and how our active directory uh structure is put into place so i hope this video made sense to you guys uh if it didn't please leave a comment below if there's something that you feel like i missed definitely leave that in the comments i want to hear from you guys on what we could do better to improve the the videos that we put out on here so thank you guys so much for watching as always take it easy

Channel: I.T. Career Questions

Views: 6,641

Keywords: IT Career Questions, cyber security, it careers, technology, information technology, it professional, active directory, setup active directory, microsoft active directory, active directory tutorial, active directory structure, active directory walk through, how to setup active directory, server 2019, microsoft server, microsoft active directory server, domain controller, active directory domain controller

Id: c3f5tjnANjY

Length: 10min 39sec (639 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 20 2020