OU stands for Organizational Unit and is a part of Windows Server Active Directory. When you add an Organizational Unit to Active Directory, this allows you to create a category for computers, or for users, or both. For example, in a high school, I may create an OU for Students and have all my student accounts within this OU, and an OU for Staff, and have all my staff accounts in this OU. Now I can apply GPO's, or Group Policy Objects, to this Organizational Unit, such as Interface controls if I want to lock down student interfaces for example. You can also configure OU's with computers in them. So for example, I may join a set of teacher computers to the Staff Computers OU within Active Directory after these machines have been joined to the domain, and then apply a Policy on that OU that says that ONLY staff accounts may log into these computers to prevent students from logging onto a staff machine.
OU's are extremely handy because you cannot apply policy objects to just a single user or computer. OU's also help keep your Active Directory structure nice and clean.
Hope this helps!
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