Active Directory customization and Human Resources management

So I'm new to Active Directory and I am being asked about extending it to include basic details about people's employment status and other custom fields. What are some good tools to help-buildout AD, particularly for non-technical HR folks?

Solution 1:

AD has a number of (16 to be exact) custom attributes pre-defined that can be managed via the ADUC console. If you don't want to mess around with extending the schema I'd recommend utilizing them. You won't be able to re-name them, so you would need to keep track of what "custom attribute 1" translates to (say "Full Time").