Structured Active Directory Schema Management at Microsoft

Microsoft have published another one in their series of documents detailing how they do IT internally. This one covers the whole arena of Active Directory Schema Management. It’s an interesting read.

If you are looking for something that removes the leap-into-the-dark feeling that anyone updating schema gets then sorry but this document doesn’t do that. What it does do is outline a practical industry-standard mechanism for reducing the risk, but nothing that actually removes the risk. They seem to have become confident in doing lots of changes which I suppose is an advantage that they have. Most of us do so few schema updates that we are always going to be wary of them.

In my personal opinion the Microsoft technologies currently contain far too many leap-in-the-dark moments that have the potential to result in massive impacts on the customer base. Schema changes is one of them, group policy changes another; but perhaps that’s what we get when we cry out for more powerful tools.