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: