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What is EAD

EAD stands for Enterprise Active Directory. EAD is a platform that provides authorization, roles and group services. It is a central database containing user’s information that will be used to authenticate and authorize them. It is integrated into almost all the major systems in the University and provides access to services such as Office365.

What EAD does

EAD is used for central authentication and authorization. Users are collected into groups. EAD checks supplied credentials and confirms that you are who you say you are, based on a utorid and a password (or it receives that information from the weblogin service). Then it checks the group for that utorid to make sure that ID can use the service that was requested.

Every time, for instance, a student wants to access Office 365, it checks the utorid and password that it receives from the weblogin system, confirms that information, and then checks the Office365 group to make sure that that utorid can use Office365. If anything along the way doesn’t work, ie a wrong password or that utorid doesn’t belong to the correct group for access to that service, it denies access to that service. If everything is correct, it lets you in.

It also manages and syncs identities from both student – ROSI – and employee – HRIS – services and groups from grouper. This allows other networks and domains within the University to check identities for authentication and authorization form a central service – EAD. It provides time services for many of the University’s servers and computers. It also provides DNS services internally.

How to use EAD

There is no specific usage of EAD for most users. What it does remains transparent while it authenticates and authorizes you to access services.

How to use EAD – technical

– EAD is currently managed and maintained by ISEA.
– There are approximately over 65 separate instances of AD within UofT
– If you are managing one of these, and would like to integrate with EAD, contact ISEA
– There is a list serve for EAD, from which messages about the bi-monthly update meeting are sent. To subscribe, send an email with “SUBSCRIBE ENTERPRISEAD-L” in the message body to listserv@listserv.utoronto.ca