Here is a simple example: We had several, methods of keeing track of everyone's phone number, cubicle location, office address, etc. One department kept the data in Excel, one kept it in a HTML webpage, one kept it in SQL... you get the idea. Now the only place that we keep it is in AD and wrote a few scripts to extract the data in a variety in formats for different purposes.
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Mulnick, Al Sent: Monday, November 29, 2004 12:00 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] What can you *do* with AD?? What you may want to consider is reversing the thought process on that. You may want to instead look at it from the business side: i.e. what business problems do I have that might be better solved with this new tool? V.s. "Hey, I have this hammer and doesn't that problem look a lot like a nail?" The latter will inevitably begin to happen if you look at the technology bits first prior to understanding the business problems. I realize you want to get more familiar and all, but figured I'd throw that out there. Al -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Michael Luevane Sent: Monday, November 29, 2004 2:55 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] What can you *do* with AD?? Yeah, see, this is where I was going. I use it for authentication - works great. Easy to manage. Joe forgets his password (third time this week??) all I need to do is open the User and Computers, go to the users, find him, reset password tell him what I reset it to and go about my merry way. 2 minutes. But I have this feeling that there is so much more that it could do. I read some of the other responses, and I'm like yes, I'd like to do that. How? Methinks I need to do much reading. I'm sure ASB has pointers on his website. I'll check there before coming back. Thanks all! Michael Luevane Systems Analyst Quantec, LLC 6229 SE Milwaukie Ave Portland, OR 97202 http://www.quantecllc.com -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Mulnick, Al Sent: Monday, November 29, 2004 11:42 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] What can you *do* with AD?? Talk about a great question! If you think about it, much is written about how or what but not a lot about why. I find that a shame myself and often structure articles in light of this. I always look at it like this: I upgraded to AD because: 1) I need to maintain a supported environment and I'm mostly a Wintel shop. 2) I need better authentication mechanisms than NTLM. 3) newer hardware won't support NT or the other apps I need. That last one leads me to the other issues. Why deploy a directory service in the first place? Why is Redhat, Novell, and many others coming up with their own directory services? What's the advantage? Why put that amount of effort into something that just sits there? :) For that, you need to look back at pre-directory services in the enterprises. What were the problems? Multiple disparate directory systems that didn't talk to each other. Vendor-specific authentication and authorization techniques meant poor interoperability. Applications that stretched the entire enterprise yet you still had to enter in user data multiple times resulting in lost productivity. I.e. email systems. Remember having one logon for email, one for mainframe, one for your desktop, etc.? With a centralized directory service you can potentially do away with much of that. While we're at it, wouldn't it be nice to store some data in that directory to make it easier to manage users? Or the next step, wouldn't it be good if we could manage network resources in a way that enforces our policies? With Active Directory those things are possible. You can use group policies to enforce corporate computer policies. You can use the directory and it's open authentication mechanisms to build interoperable applications across platforms. You can write directory-aware applications that can take advantage of a central directory and can therefore do away with it's own proprietary directory and in a roundabout way keep costs down while providing easier interoperability and SSO for many apps. There's still room to go, but these things all can be done with Active Directory (or a directory service that your desktop integrates with right?). There's also more creative answers for what you can do with Active Directory, but they will mean more to you if you come up with them. Think of Active Directory as a foundation for your computing platform and the sky's the limit :) My $0.02 Al -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Michael Luevane Sent: Monday, November 29, 2004 1:54 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [ActiveDir] What can you *do* with AD?? Okay. We've got AD. Great for logins. But there's got to be *more* to it... I've got books on how to *maintain* AD, how to configure it. But I've not seen anything that tells me what I can *do* with it, though. Any help? Michael Luevane Systems Analyst Quantec, LLC 6229 SE Milwaukie Ave Portland, OR 97202 http://www.quantecllc.com List info : http://www.activedir.org/mail_list.htm List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/list_faq.htm List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/ List info : http://www.activedir.org/mail_list.htm List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/list_faq.htm List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/ List info : http://www.activedir.org/mail_list.htm List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/list_faq.htm List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/ List info : http://www.activedir.org/mail_list.htm List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/list_faq.htm List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/ List info : http://www.activedir.org/mail_list.htm List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/list_faq.htm List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/
