Search Active Directory in WebApp for multiple users

Question

a web application I work with requires a form which allows an Administrator to add users into the web applications user table. The web application is intranet based and is run in a number of countries world wide.

They need the ability to search Active Directory to find users to add from across multiple domains. Searching domains that are geographically located further away takes much longer than searching closer domains...

Is there faster ways to search Active Directory, e.g. certain search parameters or eliminating fields to search?

and how would you populate say a session dataset and have a grid or other control refresh to retrieve the data as it is retrieved from each domain...i'm not sure how you could do this as it sounds multi-threaded which i haven't done in an asp.net webapp...

thanks heaps!

Answer 1

In Active Directory the Global Catalog contains a subset of account attributes from all domains in the forest. Since it looks like you just want to find the names that information should be in the GC. If you are doing an LDAP search bind to port 3268 instead of 389 to access the GC on the domain controller. You may need to work with our AD administrator to make sure you bind to a Domain Controller that is also a GC.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc978012.aspx

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc737410.aspx

Answer 2

This page had information roughly what I was after...Talking about optimising searches etc

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=30117&seqNum=5