what is the ou attribute of a user class

Question

I noticed the ou attribute of the user class, and am wondering what it is for. It is of type ADSTYPE_OCTET_STRING and is multivalue.

Anyone know what it is for and what ADSTYPE_OCTET_STRING data type means? is it just a standard string?

I'me trying to find a spot where I can store multiple managers. Would this be suitable?

Answer 1

OU stands for "Organizational Unit" ,and is a hangover from LDAP, which is what Active Directory is based on. Also, ADSTYPE_OCTET_STRING means that it is a character string data type.

Be aware that ActiveDirectory, like LDAP, is hierarchical, so you could have a tree cn=people,ou=Managers, and then place multiple items under this.