The Industry before Active Directory

Many production networks today are still operating without a single unified directory service. A number of small businesses and large global enterprises still store information in various disconnected systems instead of a centralized, hierarchical system such as Active Directory. For example, a company might record data about its employees (such as home addresses, phone numbers, and locations within the corporate entity) in a human resources database while network accounts reside on a Windows NT 4 Primary Domain Controller (PDC).

Other information, such as security settings for applications, resides within various other systems. And there are always the classic paper-based forms.

The main reason for this disparity ...

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