The Active User Objects (AUO) are a set of COM classes (objects) that greatly simplify working with directory database data that is accessible through Active Directory Services COM objects. The Active User Objects have coclass logical names UserObjects, SchemaObjects, and AuoConfig. The UserObjects and SchemaObjects coclasses provide the "front-end" services that programmers and scripters can use to automatically access directory information about Membership users with a minimum of hassle. Administrators can use the AuoConfig coclass to configure desired AUO providers, and less-privileged accounts can use it to view the unrestricted information that makes up these provider configurations.
The AUO relies on other COM objects to provide the raw connectivity to various directory services, databases or other data sources. At an absolute minimum, these COM objects must implement the core Active Directory Service COM Interfaces (ADSI) with logical names IADs and IADsContainer. It is through these generic interfaces that these objects provide basic storage/retrieval functionality and hierarchic structuring of data to the client application. Of course, these interfaces allow complete polymorphism on the part of the implementation, in effect hiding all of the "details" of how data is actually gathered or organized from the client application. The Microsoft Site Server 3.0 product comes with a generic set of COM objects that provide standard connectivity to a variety of data services. These include the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol v3 compliant databases (LDAP), the WinNT core directory services (WinNT), and the Internet Information Server (IIS) meta-base (IIS). A quick look in the proper registry location [HKLM\Software\Microsoft\ADs\Providers] in fact lists all the currently installed and available Active Directory Service (ADs) providers.
The examples that follow make use of the following coclasses:
The UserObjects Class (Membership.UserObjects)
The AuoConfig Class (MemAdmin.AuoConfig)
ADSI Namespace Classes (covered in the ADSI 2.0 documentation)