12.5 Summary

Carefully designing the changes that you make to the Active Directory schema cannot be stressed highly enough for large corporations or application developers. Selecting a team of Schema Managers and OID Managers and creating documentation to accompany and justify changes will smooth that process. Whether you are a small company or a large multinational, creating sensible structures should mean that you rarely make mistakes and almost never have to make objects defunct.

Hopefully we have shown you not only the perils and pitfalls of modifying the schema but also why the schema is necessary and how it underpins the entire Active Directory. While you should be cautious when modifying Active Directory, a sensible administrator should have as little to fear from the Active Directory schema as he does from the Windows Registry.