Working with Active Directory

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Active Directory gives you two means of administering and querying the Windows directory service: ADSI and LDAP. (These are scripting interfaces; the easiest method is to use the GUI tools that Windows 2000 provides.)

ADSI

Active Directory Services Interface (ADSI) is what Active Directory exposes to the outside world to let you administer and query Active Directory. ADSI is a set of APIs that software can use to make use of content with Active Directory. (The Windows 2000 GUI tools for working with Active Directory all use ADSI.)

LDAP Over ADSI

If ADSI is used as the interface to Active Directory, what about using LDAP as well? Active Directory does indeed support LDAP, both as an ADSI provider (that is, running LDAP over ADSI) and natively. However, using native LDAP support is not suitable for administrative tasks (such as adding and deleting resources), because Active Directory does not support this.

LDAP has its own syntax when dealing with X.500 resource properties. Because Active Directory is an X.500-compliant directory, you use the same LDAP syntax for accessing Active Directory resource properties as any other X.500-compliant directory (for example, cn = common name, sn = last name , and so on).

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