Active Directory Components

The Active Directory Components are a central part of the Open Directory Services Interface (ODSI), a WOSA architecture for manipulating and querying multiple directory services. Active Directory allows users to develop applications that will work with many different directory services: Active Directory Components are available for Windows NT 4.x, Novell NetWare 3.x and 4.x, and next generation Windows NT Directory Services, as well as any other directory services that support the LDAP protocol.

Active Directory Components are designed to meet the needs of traditional C and C++ programmers, system administrators, and sophisticated end users. With Active Directory components, development of directory enabled applications is fast and easy. Active Directory Components present the directory as a set of COM objects, which provide behavior in addition to data. For example, an application can use an Active Directory PrintQueue object to retrieve data such as characteristics of the queue, and also to pause the queue. In Visual Basic, this is as easy as:

Dim MyQueue as IOleDsPrintQueue
set MyQueue = GetObject("DS://Myco.Com/Division/Product/Printers/MyPrinter")
MyQueue.Pause

Because Active Directory Components are available for many popular directory services, Active Directory Components are an ideal tool for building applications that will work with multiple directories. In addition, a service provider writer may choose to supply rich query by supporting OLE DB interfaces. Thus, Active Directory service providers can be utilized by tools that take advantage of the OLE DB interfaces.

Active Directory Components are designed to meet the needs of three main audiences:

• Developers. Typically, this audience will use the Active Directory Components with a compiled language such as C++, although Microsoft Visual Basic can be used for prototyping the application. For example, a developer could write an application to manage multiple directories, network printing, back up data bases, and so on.
• System administrators. Typically, this audience will access the Active Directory Components through a scripting language, such as Microsoft Visual Basic, although C/C++ can also be used to enhance performance. For example, with Active Directory an administrator could write a script to add 100 new users to the system and establish them as members of selected security groups.
• End users. Like the system administrators, this audience will access the Active Directory Components through a scripting language. For example, an end user might write a script to locate all of their print jobs in a group of print queues and display the status of each.