How would you like to have the capabilities of Active Directory without the overhead of a complex Active Directory deployment and support infrastructure? Have you ever wanted to build an Active Directory application, but did not want to spend time designing and deploying a full-scale Active Directory implementation just to get started? You now have this option with a new feature called Active Directory Application Mode (AD/AM) or ADAM for short.

ADAM allows you to deploy a lightweight version of Active Directory on a single server without the overhead of installing a Domain Controller. In addition, ADAM make especially good sense when developing a new Active Directory aware application that is going to be making frequent changes to the schema during the development lifecycle of the application. ADAM allows you to install one or more instances of itself (as a service) on a single Windows 2003 Server.

Additionally, using ADAM allows you to have full reign of your own Active Directory instance without interfering with the company-wide or global Active Directory implementation that is in place within your organization. This allows you to store information in the directory for use by your application, independent of the policies that are in place within your organization.

For example, you may have an application (like an extranet web portal) that requires the modification of the user object in the directory and stores information about suppliers for your division of the company. However, since the information is not useful throughout your company you cannot take advantage of the global AD deployment. This is a situation where ADAM would be a perfect solution to your problem.

To find out more about Active Directory Application Mode (AD/AM), check out http://www.microsoft.com. I will probably delve down into more details of this great new capability in a future article, so stay tuned.