SharePoint 2010 and Active Directory

Question

I would like to know in details the effects of SharePoint 2010 on the Active Directory 2008 R2.

Currently, we have a SharePoint 2007 production and development environments. Both environments are connected to Active Directory 2008 R2.

Now, we are planning to upgrade SharePoint 2007 in production to SharePoint 2010. Before doing that I would like to setup a SharePoint 2010 dev env side by side with our current SharePoint 2007 dev env.

I would like to connect the SharePoint 2010 dev env to our production domain which contains the Active Directory 2008 R2. My question is how will our Active Directory 2008 R2, exchange 2007 (production) be affected by SharePoint 2010. Should we create a separate domain just for the SPS 2010 dev env?

Please advice, thanks!

Answer 1

SharePoint can use your active directory to authenticate users and you can configure SharePoint to import user profile from AD to sharepoint. However, depending upon user profile configuration, changes in user profile properties may be written back to your production AD (if you configure to do so).

I think there is no harm in connecting your Dev Box to the prod active directory although many organizations have separate AD environments for their Dev environments and I would prefer Dev not to connect to Production AD because Dev Environments and not controlled

There should not be any effect on Exchange.

Answer 2

By default, SharePoint installations don't affect Active Directory (and only do so when SP's User Profile service is specifically configured to do so post-deployment).

You can use AD to track and block SP 2010 installation:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff730261.aspx

This does not changing the AD schema.

Same for Exchange. SP doesn't alter anything with exchange.

As for creating separate domain for your Dev, that depends on your internal policies and how you handle security.