A quirk of Active Directory is that Organizational Units use an OU property rather than a CN property to define their place in the directory structure. In createobject messages you need to use CN= to create most objects. However, to allow you to create OUs we had to allow you to specify this with OU=MyNewOU.
Can ActiveADAPTER help me retrieve information from Active Directory?
Yes. The Active Directory Receive Adapter can be used to create a Receive Location that queries Active Directory at regular intervals and submit the results to your BizTalk application. A message can be submitted to BizTalk at every polling interval, or only when a change occurs in the query results (this is the "On Change Only" option on the Active Directory Receive Adapter property configuration).
In addition, the Active Directory Send Adapter can be used with a Solicit-Response Send Port to perform an on-demand query. You just send your query parameters to the send port in a message that conforms to the supplied schema, and receive your results back in a new message.
Will the ActiveADAPTER Send Adapter return error information back to my orchestration?
Yes. The adapter will return any exceptions back to your application AFTER any retries you have configured have been done.
Within your orchestration you can use Scope shapes to catch exceptions. In your exception handlers you can retrieve the error description to determine which way to branch.
Sample orchestrations that illustrate exception handing are included in the ActiveADAPTER Samples folder.
What will ActiveADAPTER add to what I see in BizTalk Server?
After installing ActiveADAPTER you will see a new transport type option when configuring a send port or receive location. With BizTalk send ports, you can create, delete, rename, move, and modify Active Directory objects. With BizTalk receive locations, you can draw XML messages into BizTalk containing Active Directory query results.
On your Programs menu you will also have an ActiveADAPTER program group containing shortcuts to documentation, sample orchestrations and schemas to get you developing your solutions quickly.