What is a LDAP?

Light weight directory access protocol- LDAP Provides a Way to Communicate with Active Directory by Specifying Unique Naming Paths for Each Object in the Directory, LDAP Naming Paths Include: Distinguished names, Domains, Organizational Units, Trees and Forests, Global Catalog.
LDAP specifies that every AD object be represented by a unique name. These names are formed by combining information about domain components, OUs, and the name of the target object, known as a common name. Attribute Type DN Abbreviation Description For example, the LDAP name for the user object for a person named Don Jones in the realtimepublishers.com domain‘s Marketing OU would be as follows: CN=Don Jones,OU=Marketing,DC=realtimepublishers,DC=com
This form of an object‘s name as it appears in the directory is referred to as the object‘s distinguished name (DN). Alternatively, an object can also be referred to using its relative distinguished name. The RDN is the portion of the DN that refers to the target object within its container. In the previous example, the RDN of the user object would simply be Don Jones.

What is the Domain?

A domain serves as the core unit in AD‘s logical structure and is defined as a collection of computers that share a common directory database.


What are the forests and trees?


A tree is a hierarchical arrangement of AD domains within AD that forms a contiguous namespace. For example, assume a domain named xcedia.com exists in your AD structure. The two subdivisions of xcedia.com are Europe and us, which are each represented by separate domains. Within AD, the names of these domains would be us.xcedia.com and europe.xcedia.com. These domains would form a domain tree because they share a contiguous namespace. This arrangement demonstrates the hierarchical structure of AD and its namespace—all of these domains are part of one contiguous related namespace
in the directory; that is to say, they form a single domain tree. The name of the tree is the root level of the tree, in this case, xcedia.com.
A forest is a collection of one or more trees. A forest can be as simple as a single AD domain, or more complex, such as a collection of multi-tiered domain trees.