Microsoft Active Directory (AD) is the central directory service for the administration of users, user groups, computers and other objects in Microsoft Windows environments. In addition, Active Directory also represents the central instance for the trust context of a Microsoft domain, in which infrastructure services such as Domain Name System (DNS) and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), file and printer services are provided.
In the Open Source environment, the above-mentioned infrastructure services, file and printer services and also the directory service can be represented with a range of Open Source software components such as Bind, ISC DHCP, Samba, CUPS and OpenLDAP. Univention Corporate Server (UCS) integrates these components to create one easy-to-use, scalable and easy-to-administrate complete solution. In the same way as the Microsoft Windows domain, UCS constructs a trust context in the form of a UCS domain, the identities of which such as users, groups and computers can be saved in the OpenLDAP directory service.
UCS Active Directory Connector was developed to connect both systems (Microsoft and Open Source) transparently and establish a migration path; this allows automatic synchronisation between Microsoft Active Directory and Univention Corporate Server including encoded passwords, group definitions and other directory service objects. It allows the seamless parallel operation of Microsoft Windows and Linux environments without high administrative efforts. UCS AD Connector avoids double, demanding, complex and error-prone administration. This makes it easier to implement safety regulations.
In addition, several Microsoft Windows domains can be synchronised parallelly, which allows the effective construction of an Open Source metadirectory, via which independent Microsoft Windows domains – alongside many other additional infrastructure components – can be administrated.
To allow a complete migration to UCS, the adoption of users, groups and other objects from the Active Directory is very simple. This allows Linux-based services and applications to be integrated in existing Active Directory environments very easily.
Alongside the command line interface, there is also a graphic module provided in the Univention Management Console (UMC) for the simple configuration of the UCS Active Directory Connector.
A detailed description of the installation and configuration of the UCS Active Directory Connector can be found in the corresponding documentation.
