The Best Damn Windows Server 2003 Book Period- P50:The latest incarnation of Microsoft’s server product,Windows Server 2003, brings many new features and improvements that make the network administrator’s job chapter will briefly summarize what’s new in 2003 and introduce you to the four members of the Windows Server 2003 family: the Web Edition, the Standard Edition, the Enterprise Edition, and the Datacenter Edition. | 456 Chapter 12 Working with Forests and Domains Distribution Groups Distribution Groups unlike Security Groups are not primarily used for access control although they can be used in an ACL at the application layer. Distribution groups are designed to be used with email applications can convert a Distribution Group to a Security Group or vice versa if the functional level is Windows 2000 native or have to be a domain or enterprise admin or a member of the Account Operators Group or have the appropriate authority delegated to convert a group. Changing the group type is as simple as right-clicking the group in Active Directory Users and Computers clicking Properties and clicking the desired group type on the General tab. Domain Trees A domain tree can be thought of as a DNS namespace composed of one or more domains. If you plan to create a forest with discontiguous namespaces you must create more than one tree. Referring back to Figure you see two trees in that forest and . Each has a contiguous namespace because each domain in the hierarchy is directly related to the domains above and below it in each tree. The forest has a discontiguous namespace because it contains two unrelated top-level domains. Forest and Domain Functional Levels Functional levels are a mechanism that Microsoft uses to remove obsolete backward compatibility within the Active Directory. It is a feature that helps improve performance and security. In Windows 2000 each domain had two functional levels which were called modes native mode and mixed mode while the forest only had one functional level. In Windows Server 2003 there are two more levels to consider in both domains and forests. To enable all Windows Server 2003 forest and domainwide features all DCs must be running Windows Server 2003 and the functional levels must be set to Windows Server summarizes the levels DCs supported in each level and each level s primary purpose. Table
