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

By default SharePoint 2010 doesn't write anything to Active Directory so there is no need to partition it off because you are concerned about making schema changes or some rogue process changing user objects in some way.

This by the way is exactly the same thing as the default OOTB behavior of SharePoint 2007.

The only thing that has changed is that the account running the new User Profile Service in SP2010 needs to have the Replicating Directory Changes permission. This isn't normally a default permission for accounts so it has to be explictly granted. Note that this doesn't give accounts the ability to change things in AD but rather be able to enumerate changes in AD so that those changes can be made within the SharePoint databases. Reference: http://www.harbar.net/articles/sp2010ups.aspx