Designing OU Structures that Work

How much planning do you put into your Organizational Unit, or OU, structure? If you're like many administrators, probably not enough. Too many administrators underestimate the importance and complexity of a well-designed OU structure. It is something that needs to be tailored to your environment, and it must strike a balance that ensures the structure is suited to your environment but also manageable.  As Ken St. Cyr says in the May issue of TechNet Magazine:

"Overemphasizing the OU structure takes focus away from other areas of Active Directory design, such as planning the site topology or thinking about domain controller sizing. On the other hand, when OU planning is put on the back burner, Group Policy and delegation suffer."

In his article, "Designing OU Structures that Work," Ken discusses the key principles of good OU design, he outlines the most common design models, and gives advice on documenting your design.

Pop Quiz: Which OU model classifies objects by their purpose?

Cheers,
matt

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