Active Directory, 4th Edition

Chapter 26. Extending the Schema and the Active Directory Snap-ins

This chapter takes a look at two different areas: programmatically extending the schema and customizing the functionality of the Active Directory administrative MMC snap-ins. Although these topics may seem very different, they share the common thread of storing and presenting information beyond what Active Directory is configured to do by default. They are also related because you will often want to include new schema extensions in the Active Directory snap-ins.

In the first half of the chapter, we take a look at how you can manipulate the schema to include new attributes and classes. In the second half, we describe how to modify the various components of the Active Directory Users and Computers (ADUC) snap-in to include customized display names and menus. While we will focus on ADUC, the techniques presented in this chapter can be used to modify any of the Active Directory administrative snap-ins.

Modifying the Schema with ADSI

We’ve shown you how the schema works in Chapter 4 and how to design extensions in Chapter 14. Now let’s take a look at how to query and manipulate the schema using ADSI.

IADsClass and IADsProperty

In addition to being able to query and update schema objects as you can any other type of object with the IADs interface, there are two main schema-specific interfaces available: IADsClass and IADsProperty. Each of these interfaces has a variety of useful methods and property methods to allow you to ...