Active Directory: Deploying and managing certificates

The purpose of this course is to create a Certificate Authority using Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS) with Microsoft Windows Server. This course offers a comprehensive step-by-step guide that demonstrates how to successfully create a Certificate Authority using those technologies.

This course also explains each step, the necessity of that step, and the importance of that step within the Certificate Authority. The results of this course will create a Certificate Authority that can issue certificates internally within an organization in a secure manner, using best practices.

This course is meant for developers, network administrators and systems administrators who have a basic understanding of Windows Server and Public Key Infrastructures and need to deploy a Certificate Authority rapidly within their environment for various purposes. By using the steps provided in this course, there will be a Certificate Authority framework created that can be customized for whatever requirements are needed in any

environment.

This course is also meant to be used by developers, network administrators and system administrators who can interpret this guide and modify it for their existing environment.

Simply following this guide will not implement a functioning PKI for your organization, you will need to modify the steps accordingly to make it function properly. This means creating different servers, modifying steps for different Active Directory domains, modifying LDAP settings, modifying file paths, creating different certificates, and other critical steps as needed.

The contents of this course is presented in a thorough, but easy to follow manner.

Hands-on demonstrations are provided for important steps for verification purposes and to demonstrate how the environment should be configured. It should take approximately twelve hours to go through this course from start to finish.

After designing and deploying the certification authority (CA) hierarchy, it is very important to design certificate templates properly, define certificate usage, and implement backup and recovery techniques for certificates.

In this module, you will learn how to deploy and manage certificates, configure certificate templates, and manage the enrollment process. In addition, you will learn about using certificates in business environments and about deploying and managing smart cards.

Objectives

After completing this module, you will be able to:

· Deploy and manage certificate templates.

· Manage certificate deployment, revocation, and recovery.

· Use certificates in a business environment.

· Implement and manage smart cards.

· Deploy CAs.

· Administer CAs.

· Troubleshoot and maintain CAs.