Defining Organizational Units in Active Directory

An organizational unit is an administrative-level container, depicted in Figure 6.1, that is used to logically organize objects in Active Directory. The concept of the organizational unit is derived from the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) standard upon which Active Directory was built, although there are some conceptual differences between pure LDAP and Active Directory.

Figure 6.1. Active Directory organizational structure.

Objects within Active Directory can be logically placed into OUs as defined by the administrator. Although all user objects are placed in the Users container by default and computer objects are placed in the Computers container, they can be moved at any time.

Note

The default Users and Computers folders in Active Directory are not technically organizational units. Rather, they are technically defined as Container class objects. It is important to understand this point because these Container class objects do not behave in the same way as organizational units. To be able to properly utilize services such as Group Policies, which depend on the functionality of OUs, it is recommended that you move your user and computer objects from their default container locations into an OU structure.

Each object in the Active Directory structure can be referenced via LDAP queries that point to its specific location in the OU structure. You will often see objects referenced in this format when you're writing scripts to modify or create users in Active Directory or simply running LDAP queries against Active Directory. For example, in Figure 6.2, a user named Andrew Abbate in the San Jose Users OU would be represented by the following LDAP string:

CN=Andrew Abbate,OU=Users,OU=San Jose,DC=companyabc,DC=com 

Figure 6.2. Viewing the LDAP of a user object in AD.

Note

OU structure can be nested, or include sub-OUs that are many layers deep. Keep in mind, however, that the more complex the OU structure, the more difficult it becomes to administer and the more time-consuming directory queries become. Microsoft recommends not nesting more than 10 layers deep. However, it would be wise to keep the complexity significantly shorter than that number to maintain the responsiveness of directory queries.

OUs primarily satisfy the need to delegate administration to separate groups of administrators. Although there are other possibilities for the use of OUs, this type of administration delegation is, in reality, the primary factor that exists for the creation of OUs in an AD environment. See the "Starting an OU Design" section of this chapter for more details on this concept.

The Need for Organizational Units

While there is a tendency to use organizational units to structure the design of Active Directory, OUs should not be created to just document the organizational chart of the company. The fact that the organization has a Sales department, a Manufacturing department, and a Marketing department doesn't suggest that there should be these three Active Directory OUs. An administrator should create organizational units if the departments will be administered separately and/or policies will be applied differently to the various departments. However, if the departments will all be administered by the same IT team, and the policies being applied will also be the same, having multiple OUs is not necessary.

Additionally, organizational units are not exposed to the directory, meaning that if a user wants to send an email to the members of an OU, he would not see the OU structure nor the members in the OU grouping.

To see members of an organizational structure, Active Directory groups should be created. Groups are exposed to the directory and will be seen when a user wants to list members and groups in the organization.