Active Directory Cookbook Blog

Red Hat to pay $20 million for Netscape assets

Looks like RedHat is going to get into the Directory game:

"The Raleigh-based company said it would acquire Netscape Directory Server and Netscape Certificate Management System and plans to include these technologies in its open source system sold to companies worldwide."
Continue at source.

# posted by Robbie (9/30/2004 05:41:03 PM)

Winternals Launches Insight for Active Directory 2.0 Public Beta

"Winternals, a leading provider of Microsoft systems infrastructure availability and performance solutions, today announced the public beta program for Insight for Active Directory 2.0, a real-time, Active Directory (AD) diagnostic solution. Insight for Active Directory is the first diagnostic product capable of pinpointing the precise causes of application and service failures resulting from AD configuration, corruption, and communication issues."
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# posted by Robbie (9/27/2004 07:57:50 PM)

New Download: Microsoft DNS Server Management Pack Guide

"This guide provides information about the Microsoft Windows DNS Server Management Pack, including monitoring scenarios, deployment steps, operations tasks, and reference content."

# posted by Robbie (9/26/2004 11:31:11 PM)

Active Directory Webcast Week: Sept 27-Oct 1

Next week is Active Directory Webcast week at Microsoft. They are planning 15 webcasts throughout the week on topics ranging from Regulatory Compliance to troubleshooting and scripting.

# posted by Robbie (9/23/2004 09:04:13 AM)

New Download: Microsoft Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer Tool

The Microsoft Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer Tool was just released. It looks pretty good and does some AD analysis.

"The Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer incorporates the accumulated experience that Microsoft engineers have gleaned from working with Microsoft's own IT infrastructure and from working with customers' Exchange Server topologies. It also addresses specific issues that come up most often during customer-initiated sessions with Microsoft Customer Service and Support (CSS) -- for instance, how to optimize a service for maximum scalability or availability -- and features automatic access to an always-current Help file that contains the latest issue analyses and configuration best practices."

# posted by Robbie (9/22/2004 02:08:30 PM)

AutoProf Policy Maker Will Not Require Upgrade for XP SP2

"AutoProf, the leading vendor of Group Policy Extensions for Microsoft Active Directory networks, announced
today that in the wake of Windows XP Service Pack 2 its customers will not require an upgrade for Policy Maker, the company's innovative desktop configuration management system for Windows 2000, XP and 2003 Server operating systems. Additionally, their market leading Outlook Profile management product, Profile Maker, will also not require an upgrade."
Continue at source...

# posted by Robbie (9/19/2004 12:42:03 AM)

U.S. Army Medical Command Selects NetPro Software

"The [US Army] Technology Center purchased 65,000 seats of ChangeAuditor for Active Directory and DirectoryLockdown, two of Continue at source...

# posted by Robbie (9/19/2004 12:37:29 AM)

Article: Sun, Microsoft to detail interoperability next month

"Sun Microsystems and Microsoft next month plan to provide more details on the work they are doing to make their products interoperable. The announcement will focus on interoperability in the Web services and directory services areas, said Mark McClain, vice president of software marketing at Sun, during a meeting with press and analysts at Sun's offices in Burlington, Mass."
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# posted by Robbie (9/19/2004 12:19:54 AM)

Article: Novell lays out infrastructure, identity wares at BrainShare

Here is more info on Novell's product announcements at the annual Novell BrainShare conference. Besides introducing the virtual directory product I spoke of in my last post, they also announced the release of eDirectory 8.8, which includes "performance and several small enhancements".

# posted by Robbie (9/19/2004 12:16:56 AM)

Novell Introduces Virtual Directory Services

Well it looks like virtual directories are now in vogue as Novell Introduces Virtual Directory Services to Enable the Identity-driven Enterprise. I haven't heard anything out of the Microsoft camp on this, so it will be interesting to see what plans they have in the virtual directory space.

# posted by Robbie (9/19/2004 12:13:05 AM)

Article: Microsoft Delivers on Centralized Security

It looks like Microsoft is finally going to deliver the centralized audit collection service (formerly known as MACS and now known as ACS) by the end of the year. It has been much awaited and is now much overdue. Don Jones provides an update on the latest with ACS. Let's hope MS doesn't charge for it...

# posted by Robbie (9/08/2004 10:55:06 PM)

Virtual Directories

Ever heard of a "virtual directory"? It is similar to a metadirectory except instead of being a centralized source of provisioning and syncing, it is a centralized view of multiple directories and databases. It is similar in concept to a "view" in a database. It allows you to make an LDAP query to a single server and get data back from potentially multiple underlying directories and databases. Neat idea.

Here is an article on how Boeing is making use of virtual directories.

The leader in the virtual directory market is a company called OctetString, which interestingly enough, was founded by Clayton Donley. Clayton was an active member of the LDAP community back in the late 1990's. He was the author of the PerlDAP API when he was at Netscape. I was one of the early testers of PerlDAP, but later threw my support (and some code) to Net::LDAP. PerlDAP required the LDAP SDK to be installed while Net::LDAP was a pure Perl implementation.

Anyway, it looks like Clayton's team is doing some good work. This is definitely a product to keep an eye on.

# posted by Robbie (9/07/2004 10:48:03 PM)

Article: McNealy pitches Sun security

I'm still waiting to see what fruit the MS/Sun relationship bears in the directory services space. McNealy continues to talk it up:

"McNealy also pointed to deals that Sun officials have struck with other technology companies on chip and systems partnerships as evidence of their attempts to make sure Sun systems work with as many other platforms as possible. A big part of that may well be the 10-year development agreement Sun recently made with Microsoft Corp. The first result of that pact will likely be a directory and single sign-on initiative, which will bring the LDAP and Active Directory worlds closer together, McNealy said.
That initiative should be formally announced within the next couple of months, he said."
Continue at source...

# posted by Robbie (9/07/2004 10:24:43 PM)

Article: XP refresh gives rise to plethora of Group Policy settings

XP SP2 adds roughly 700 new Group Policy settings. Of course you could have modified these settings through custom ADM files before, but now they are much easier to manipulate being directly part of the GUI.
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# posted by Robbie (9/07/2004 10:19:47 PM)

Article: "Tiger" Integration With Windows Yields Deals For Partners

Another article on the enhanced AD support in Apple's upcoming "Tiger" release of OS X:

"Forget the new iMacs and iPods. Apple is leaving a lot of dough on the table by not pushing its Mac OSX software aggressively into corporations running Windows.

So says Technology Execution Network Corp., a Microsoft solution provider and Apple Authorized Dealer based in Needham, Mass., which says the latest versions of the Unix-based Macintosh OSX operating system code-named "Panther" significantly enhances the ability for the Mac client and server to integrate with Microsoft's Active Directory and Windows server environment."
Continue at source...

# posted by Robbie (9/07/2004 10:15:40 PM)

Article: Windows world gets OS X wake up call

"The latest versions of the Unix-based Mac OS X operating system significantly enhances the ability for the Mac client and server to integrate with Microsoft's Active Directory and Windows server environment.

Windows support has been there for some time, but people weren't convinced that they worked together. Now they do. The compatibility was there technically before but now it's usable.

Bay Digital service engineer Anson Pham said: "We can always get a Mac on the network, but for Outlook and calendaring the Mac was always the bastard child. But 3.5's Active Directory support and the new Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac closes those gaps and builds that bridge."

Continue at source...

# posted by Robbie (9/07/2004 10:11:00 PM)

Article: Army migrates away from Windows NT

More news on the Army migration from Windows NT to Active Directory.

# posted by Robbie (9/07/2004 10:08:30 PM)

New Download: Active Directory Management Pack for MOM 2005

Microsoft recently announced the release of MOM 2005 and now they've made the Active Directory Management Pack (ADMP) for MOM 2005 available for download. If you want an overview of what ADMP can do, check out the ADMP Guide.

# posted by Robbie (9/02/2004 10:47:24 AM)