The goal of Active Directory is to provide a unified view of the network that will greatly reduce the number of directories and namespaces with which network administrators and users must contend. Active Directory is specifically designed to interoperate with and manage other directories, regardless of their location or their underlying operating systems. To accomplish this, Active Directory provides extensive support for existing standards and protocols, and provides application programming interfaces (APIs) that facilitate communication with these other directories.

The following table describes the technologies that Active Directory supports, the purpose of the technology, and a reference for more information on the technology.

Technology Purpose Reference
Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) Network address management RFC 1542
DNS dynamic update protocol Host namespace management RFC 2052 and RFC 2163
Simple Network Time Protocol (SNTP) Distributed time service RFC 1769
Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) v3 Directory access RFC 2251
LDAP 'C' Directory API RFC 1823
LDAP Data Interchange Format (LDIF) Directory synchronization Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Draft
LDAP Directory schema RFC 2247, RFC 2252, and RFC 2256
Kerberos version 5 Authentication RFC 1510
X.509 v3 certificates Authentication International Organization for Standardization (ISO) X.509
Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) Network transport RFC 791 and RFC 793

Supporting these Internet standards provides several benefits: