A contact is an Active Directory object that holds e-mail and telephone information about an individual, without giving that person a security account on the network.
Contacts do not have a security identifier, unlike user accounts and groups. Contacts are used to add members to distribution lists or groups without granting them access to network resources.
You can use Active Roles to create, modify, and delete contacts. You can also perform Exchange-related tasks such as establishing email addresses for contacts.
The following section describes how to use the Active Roles console to manage contacts. You can also use the Active Roles Web Interface to perform contact management tasks.
You can create a new contact as follows: in the console tree, right-click the container where you want to add the contact, select New | Contact, and then follow the instructions in the wizard.
In the wizard, some property labels may be displayed as hyperlinks. In the following figure, this is Full name. The hyperlink indicates that Active Roles enforces certain policy restrictions on this property. To examine policy details, click the hyperlink: the policy information is displayed (see Getting policy-related information earlier in this document).
Figure 22: Creating a contact
The policy information is also displayed whenever you supply a property value that violates a policy restriction. The wizard cannot proceed until you enter an acceptable value.