Weighing the Requirements

After the assessment phase of the Active Directory project is complete, you should have a solid grasp of the current computing environment. Information should be gathered and contained in a series of documents:

• Environment Assessment —This document includes three important sections. Network, workstation, and user assessments are used for the design and implementation of Active Directory. The network, in particular, transcends user and business requirements to put technical limitations on the Active Directory domain topology. Understanding the infrastructure of an organization, including the hardware and software being used, provides useful information necessary to build your Active Directory architecture.

• Administration Assessment —This document illustrates how the current environment is managed. Grouping administrators by the tasks they perform gives you a view of the administrative environment as it is now. Many organizations base their Active Directory design heavily on the administrative requirements of their organization.

• Application Assessment —This document inventories the applications that are currently in use and identifies the users of each. Active Directory gives you the ability to better manage the workstation by restricting the applications that users can access. It also gives you the ability to publish or assign applications to specific groups of users, based on OUs, sites, or domains.

• Directory Integration Assessment —This document is meant to determine what role Active Directory plays in the organization's overall directory services strategy. There are usually multiple directories in an organization. Determining what role Active Directory plays, and how it is integrated with the other directories, helps to scope the project.

• Organizational Structure Assessment —This document is made to expose the project team to the entire enterprise and to give context to the far-reaching ramifications that the Active Directory design has. The Organizational Structure Assessment can also be used to compare how an OU structure built based on administrative or application business requirements compares to how the organization is actually structured.