Everybody knows how tedious it may be working with self-signed SSL certificates. That’s why it’s easier to add the Microsoft Certificate server role to your Active Directory. However, manual certificate enrollment is not so handy when there are dozens of users within one IT infrastructure, and if that’s the case, it won’t hurt to learn how to cut a corner or two!
Most every application we run in our datacenters today provides some sort of web-based interface. The push to move to HTML5, API driven GUIs is a good one – we can access things from anywhere, using any device or browser. The problem being we are also seeing a push for security, more specifically ensuring that all our web accessible interfaces are running through SSL and only accessed through https. To get around this administrators can go out and purchase a certificate from a trusted authority, however this could get pretty expensive if you start adding up all of the self-signed certificates within your environment. Another answer – the Microsoft Certificate Server.
