In this lesson, I'll be showing you how you can create Active Directory user accounts.

Now, I am picking it up right where I left off in the last lesson and I have the Active Directory console open. If you know how that opens, you are following along in the IT lab, go ahead and open it now.

What I am going to do is expand my domain ad.serveracademy.com and I want to mention right away that it's extremely important that you create the Active Directory user account in the right location. If you created the AD user in the wrong spot that means they could get the wrong set of Group Policy security settings. So, just to explain this a little bit more, we have a full course at  ServerAcademy.com for Group Policy. We are not going to get deep into it in this course, but, if I have an Organizational Unit, Server Academy, which you'll notice almost every organization has this, they'll have a Domain and then they'll have an OU that kind of mimics the same name, so I have ad.serveracademy.com. Up here is my domain and I have an OU for that where I am going to put ALL of my domain infrastructure.

So, I have Domain Admins and Domain Users. Now, it's possible that they'll be different Group Policy objects applied to this OU versus this OU. So, Domain Users and Domain Admins will get different security settings than Users in Domain Users.

That's important because you don't want to create a user in the Domain Admins if they are not supposed to be a Domain Admin because you don't want them to have more access than they should, okay? This all again would have to go back to how Group Policy and how is configured for your Domain, and you really don't know that until you open the Group Policy management console, but I just want to stress that it is important we create the AD users in the correct location.

If you guys are starting an IT job, I don't want you taking this training and then creating all your users under the root of the domain or in the Users container worst of all. We want to create everything in the Server Academy Organizational Unit where they belong.

Now, again, this is going to differ from every enterprise, so not all are going to have the same layout here, this OU I created manually and I created these OUs specifically for this IT Lab because this is generally how I see it setup. But, just note that it may be different in your workplace, and if you are not sure just ask. It never hurts to ask and that's going to be something that everyone is going to expect you to act before you just go out and figure it out on your own.

Now, with that being said there are a couple of different ways we can create a user. I am going to choose the Organizational Unit where I want to create the user account. In this case, we’ll create it under Domain Users, and we can select the New User button up here. We can right-click on the OU and choose New User. Or we can right-click once we've opened the Organizational Unit and select New User.

I am just going to choose this one, and a new pop-up will appear, and what we are going to do here is just type in the information of the user. I am going to use myself so that will be Paul Hill, and well call it paul.hill as my username. Generally, I like to use first name dot last name but every company is going to have a different naming convention for their user accounts. If you are not sure just take a look at the other user accounts and see how they are naming their users and hopefully there's some kind of standard or convention and you can follow that.

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