Wednesday, August 09, 2006

The Beauty of Active Directory Sites

The real beauty of Sites in Microsoft Active Directory is the ability to change replication times and Group Policy Objects.

We are a small company with around 30 employees TOTAL. Most share computers and few have private log-ins. Not much changes in any office, so why update the other Domain Controllers every three hours? My point exactly. Currently set up is an 8 hour replication time with 10am to 2pm not available for replication Monday through Friday. Saturday and Sunday is not available the entire day due to Offsite backups.

We have four offices, with three of them not staffed by IT. This means that when we get a chance to get out of the office and visit these other offices there are always more problems than reported and WE come under prepared for the tasks.

Currently in development is locking down these other offices to the point of doing their respective jobs, but not to the point of being the “All seeing Big Brother”. Spyware is our biggest problem followed by time wasting internet surfing, especially to Poker sites.

Active Directory allows me to set Group Policy on these other sites to disallow certain things and force certain things. One of the things that I force is Automatic Updates. Currently set to download and install every day at 3am. Also set to look at our Microsoft Windows Server Update Services Server.

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