Active Directory

Deploy HiBob to Active Directory provisioning through Microsoft Entra: validate permissions, mappings, approvals, agent health, monitoring, and rollback.

Pilot Microsoft Entra Domain Services SAM account name sync safely: verify Active Directory source names, test legacy authentication, and monitor convergence.

Pilot Microsoft Entra AD group enforcement safely: prepare every writable domain controller, audit blocked writes, test Cloud Sync, and plan rollback.

Exchange attribute writeback for cloud-managed remote mailboxes is now generally available. Learn how the source-of-authority split works, what writes back to Active Directory, and how to pilot and roll back the change safely.

Twenty-five practical Active Directory interview questions with clear, technically accurate answers covering AD DS, DNS, Kerberos, replication, Group Policy, recovery, and security.

Choose the correct deployment scenario, protect the DSRM password, review functional levels, and collect evidence after domain controller promotion.

A preparation and handover checklist for a physical domain controller: hardware support, recovery, network identity, deployment decisions, and acceptance evidence.

A subnet-to-site change can affect domain controller discovery, site-linked Group Policy, and site-aware services. Verify each separately instead of assuming a fixed convergence time.

Understand DNS records, resolvers, caching, and the checks that help distinguish a name-resolution failure from an application or Active Directory problem.

Understand how sites, subnets, and site links model an Active Directory network—and which discovery and replication behaviours need verification.

Ever wondered how a company with 5,000 employees magically makes everyone's login work on every computer? Or how your work laptop just knows what printer to use, what network drive to mount, and what apps you're allowed to open? That's Active Directory doing its thing behind the scenes. Grab a coffee. We're going to demystify the single most important piece of enterprise IT you've never seen — and by the end you'll actually get it.

You've read the Microsoft docs. You've watched the videos. It hasn't stuck. The reason it hasn't stuck is that Active Directory is a hands-on discipline and reading about it is not the same as breaking and fixing it yourself. Here's the smallest useful home lab that will let you actually practise — hardware, software, topology, and the first ten exercises to run through.

A forward lookup zone is the database on a DNS server that answers 'what's the IP address for this hostname.' In a Windows Server environment running Active Directory, the choices you make when creating that zone — primary vs secondary vs AD-integrated, who replicates it, who can update records in it — determine whether your forest is robust or fragile for years afterward. Here's the full picture, written for someone who knows DNS exists but hasn't actually configured a Windows DNS server before.