Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) administration and management includes 12 major tasks. These tasks cover a wide breadth of business needs and are not all performed solely by AD DS administrators. In fact, administrators can and should delegate several tasks to other members of their technical community, technicians, help desk personnel, even users such as team managers and administrative assistants. While delegation is a way to reduce the amount of work administrators have to do when managing AD DS infrastructures, it really only addresses one or two of the 12 tasks, for example, user and group administration as well as end point device administration. The other ten tasks can be staggering in nature — security, networked service administration, OU-Specific Management, Group Policy Object management and many more — and because of this can take up inordinate amounts of time. You can rely on Microsoft’s built-in tools to reduce some of this workload, but are the native tools enough? Perhaps it’s time to reduce AD DS administration overhead by automating most tasks and tightening internal security. Address this by first, determining what the twelve essential labors of Active Directory are and then, see how you can reduce AD DS workloads through the implementation of proper management and administration tools.