Organizational units (OU) group and organize components of an organization’s structure for management. X.500 standards developed OU for electronic directory services. Users and groups can be organized into OUs for easy management. OUs are also used for digital security certificate management.
An organizational unit (OU) is a method used in computer systems administration to group and organize the various components of an organization’s structure to facilitate its management. Conceptually, an organizational unit can be seen as a sort of container for ordering the structure of the organization, allowing changes to be applied at any level of the hierarchy. Anything can fit into an organizational unit container, including people, groups of people, computer systems, or entire networks.
The use of the organizational unit was first described in a set of standards developed in the late 1980s by the Standardization Sector of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T). The standards became known as X.500 and concerned methods for managing electronic directory services, where information can be stored and organized. The X.511 standard further detailed the Directory Access Protocol (DAP) for working with these directory services. In the early 1990’s, Novell® began using this protocol in its directory services software and Lotus® also found use for the technique and included organizational units in its Lotus® Notes® program around version three . Later, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) developed the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) to perform similar functions over an Internet Protocol (IP) network.
How a particular organizational unit is set up is through a multi-layered approach that often mirrors the organization itself. You can nest a number of separate organizational units within each other, depending on your organization structure. At the top level is what is often referred to as the domain. Separate organizational units are then established, which can contain anything from another branch of an organization, such as a parent company’s branch, to that branch’s departments and further down a department’s user groups and the users themselves .
In many cases an organizational unit is used for managing users on the network. Users, like user groups, can be organized into an organizational unit. In this way, users can be organized so that changes to the organizational unit are propagated to all users contained in it. If a user or group is moved to another organizational unit, their status and permissions will automatically update. This method of user management is found in many enterprise software products, including Microsoft® Active Directory® and IBM® Lotus Mobile Connect®, as well as a host of other LDAP software systems.
From its roots in the X.500 series of standards, the organizational unit is also often used in digital security certificate management. In the X.509 standard, the management of security certificate hierarchies is organized through organizational units. This allows for detailed management of groups of certificates, as well as differentiation between two certificate owners that may have the same name.
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