In this lesson, I am going to be giving you an introduction to the Active Directory console.

Now, I am logged into my Domain Controller here, and I just want to start by clarifying that you can tell if you are on a Domain Controller by the inside of Server Manager, looking for the AD DS or Active Directory Domain Services role.

Now, there are other ways to start Active Directory, but what we are going to do is start it from within Server Manager.

Again, if you don't have Server Manager up you can click the Start button here, and just select Server Manager.

You can also search for Active Directory here, and if you are not able to log directly into the Domain Controller you can install tools like RSAT or the Remote Server Administration Toolset, and you can download and install the Active Directory console and connect remotely to your Active Directory Domain Controller.

Now, once you have Server Manager open what we are going to do is select Tools in the top right-hand corner of the screen and we are going to select Active Directory Users and Computers. Nine times out of ten when somebody says, hey I need you to open Active Directory this is what they are talking about.

Now, you'll notice that there are more Active Directory consoles here like Active Directory Administrative Center, Domains and Trusts, Sites and Services, and the Module for PowerShell. Nine times out of ten they are going to be talking about Active Directory Users and Computers. So, we are going to select this, and the Active Directory console will open. I am going to go ahead and just maximize this and expand the screen here.

Now, what you'll notice here is on the left-hand side here we have a navigation pane and then we have the contents of our current directory. So, we have the Saved Queries here at the top, and our actual domain, which in this course and in our lab that you'll be using later on in the course is ad.serveracademy.com. We can click these drop-down arrows and expand any contents. I don't have any saved queries, so there's nothing to be listed here, but we can click on the domain and we can browse to these different folders, just like you would expect, like Windows Explorer, something similar like that.

Now, up here on the left we have our File menu which we can change some Options, really just for deleting files if we want to do disk cleanup. I've never had to do that but is there if you want to do that. We can also Exit the console.

Under Action, we can create New Users, Computers, Groups, Printers, Shared Folders, and things like that.

We can also complete Tasks that we may deem necessary by selecting an object and clicking the Action menu. Now, these setup tasks might be different depending on what kind of object we select, for example, if I select a user account here, and I click actions, I am going to get a different set of options than if I clicked the domain and clicked All Tasks.

Now, you'll notice you can get to the same views by right-clicking the Active Directory object over here on the left and selecting All Tasks, and the same thing for users, if I right-click a user and All Tasks I get the same options.

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