ADAM is an extremely exciting product that is certainly going to find heavy use for both Microsoft and other applications in the enterprise environment. The flexibility it offers allows an Active Directory administrator to say “We can do that” more often now in order to support line of business applications and other functions that they would have never allowed near their domain-based Active Directory. Knowledge and understanding of AD LDS will become more and more important to all Active Directory administrators going forward as more and more applications start to leverage it.

In this chapter, basic AD LDS concepts, as well as some more advanced concepts, were discussed and explored. Next, differences between AD LDS and Active Directory as well as updates in the Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2003 R2 and Windows Server 2003 SP1 versions of AD LDS/ADAM were discussed. A complete walkthrough of the installation of the core components of AD LDS was provided, as well as walkthroughs for the installations of a standard unique instance and a replica instance with screenshots and tables illustrating decision points. Readers were also introduced to the new and updated tools that ship with AD LDS. Finally, many ldifde.exe examples showing most aspects of creating and deleting objects and partitions were provided and discussed to help a new AD LDS administrator quickly get up and running with a new AD LDS instance.