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Active Directory : Benefits
Departments considering the use of Active Directory on campus should use the UIC AD forest. The UIC AD forest makes the most sense when considering the use of Microsoft technology on the UIC campus. The ACCC considers the UIC AD forest a critical service and priority for student and departmental use and support.
Some of the benefits in utilizing the UIC AD forest include;
Built-in Account Management
The UIC Active directory will feature a full set of user accounts for all students, staff and faculty on campus. The ACCC will monitor and maintain all user accounts in a central branch of the AD tree thus relieving individual departments of this responsibility.
Synchronized Passwords
One benefit of ACCC maintained AD accounts is users will have the same password for Active Directory, E-mail and other ACCC services. The ACCC provides a web page for account management in AD and other ACCC offered services.
Reduced Cost
The ACCC has invested in the hardware and software to provide the UIC campus with a reliable AD infrastructure. This allows departments to leverage AD without the expense of servers and time in maintining network infrastructure.
The ACCC maintains servers hosting our Root and AD.UIC.EDU domains in the UIC AD forest. The ACCC also provides the back end FSMO, Wins, and DNS servers needed to provide services in the Active Directory at UIC.
Autonomy and Control
Even though the UIC AD is centrally managed, departments can elect to have their own branch in the Active Directory tree. This will give the department the flexibility to publish computing resources and file shares on department owned servers. The departmental branches will be secured from the rest of the AD forest and departments will have full control of the branch.
Departments can add containers, servers, objects and organizational units under their top level OU as needed. This gives the flexibility to organize unit data and resrouces according to your departmental structure.
Support
When utilizing the UIC AD forest you are not "going it alone" with the technology. The ACCC provides various levels of support with regard to the UIC AD forest. ACCC Administrators are available for consulting and problem tracking should you have technical issues with your departmental branch. It is reassuring knowing that if there are problems there is a place to turn to for help. The ACCC gives the UIC AD forest top priority when allocating consulting and support resources.
Savings
By using the centeral services offered by the ACCC departmental administrators can focus on improving rather than maintaining IT resources. REACH and IT support personnel are freed from the day to day maintenance of users and accounts. This can allow IT support staff to spend more time developing and expanding computing resources at the departmental level.
We don't see the ACCC replacing REACH and IT personnel in the campus departments. Our goal is to lower the cost of using Active Directory on the UIC campus. This could allow deparments to address specific computing needs by spending money on active computing resources instead of infrastructure.
Campus Usage
The following departments are leveraging the benefits of the UIC AD forest on a daily basis.
- ACCC PC Public Computing Labs
- ACCC Small Systems LAN Group
- Applied Health Sciences Administration
- UIC Multimedia Classrooms (ACCC Maintained)
We sincerely hope you will be the next department to take advantage of our service offering.
- ACCC
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