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Active Directory clients

  • Article

Applies To: Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2003 with SP1, Windows Server 2003 with SP2

Active Directory clients

With the Active Directory client, many of the Active Directory features available on Windows 2000 Professional or Windows XP Professional are available to computers running Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT 4.0.

  • Site awareness

    You can log on to the domain controller that is closest to the client in the network. For more information, see Locating a domain controller.

  • Active Directory Service Interfaces (ADSI)

    You can use scripting to Active Directory. ADSI also provides a common programming API to Active Directory programmers.

  • Distributed File System (DFS)

    You can access DFS shared resources on servers running Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003.

  • NTLM version 2 authentication

    You can use the improved authentication features in NTLM version 2.

    For more information about enabling NTML version 2, see article Q239869, "How to Enable NTLM 2 Authentication," in the Microsoft Knowledge Base.

  • Active Directory Windows Address Book (WAB) property pages

    You can change properties, such as phone number and address, on user object pages.

  • Active Directory search capability

    From the Start button, you can locate printers and people in a Windows 2000 Server or Windows Server 2003 domain.

    For information about publishing printers in Active Directory, see article Q234619, "Publishing a Printer in Windows 2000 Active Directory," in the Microsoft Knowledge Base.

Windows 2000 Professional and Windows XP Professional provide functionality that the Active Directory client on Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT 4.0 does not, including Kerberos V5 support; Group Policy or IntelliMirror support; and service principal name (SPN), or mutual authentication. You can take advantage of these additional features by upgrading to Windows 2000 Professional or Windows XP Professional.

To install the Active Directory client, see the Active Directory client page at the Microsoft Web site.