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April 19, 1999

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Netware And Windows Directory Services

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DM/Reporter is a sophisticated reporting tool that generates reports from both historic and real-time data from Windows NT domains, Exchange and FastLane directories. It can generate reports automatically and track data histories over time. Reports can be published to a Web server, allowing access from any browser.

Available reports include nearly every conceivable aspect of the network, from BIOS, hard-disk usage, and operating-system status on workstations, to account details from all domains, exchange servers, and shared network directories. Specifying which reports to run and collecting and consolidating the data is straightforward and easy.

At a cost similar to NDS for NT, DM/Suite offers substantial additional functionality for NT-only networks, including Exchange management and excellent reporting capabilities.

Mission Critical Software Enterprise Administrator 4.5
Using Enterprise Administrator is easy once you learn its terminology. It creates Territories, which are logical groups of users, user groups and network resources. It also creates a Marshal, the overall administrator of each territory, and deputies, who have administrative access to specific groups of user accounts, user groups, and network resources. While the different terminologies may seem confusing, they make it simpler to differentiate between the previous-existing NT domains and the virtual domains created by the directory software.

Enterprise Administrator includes some extremely useful tools for domain consolidation, as well as extensive logging and reporting tools, giving administrators the tools to track down errors or users who are behaving inappropriately. It offers granular control of the administration of network resources, allowing delegation of administrative rights over users, groups of users, print queues, services, devices, network shares (shared disk drives), workstations, and servers.

Administrative rights can be granted using wild cards in names, so that control of all print queues matching *_queue_boston could be granted to a deputy with a single command. This is potentially an extremely useful feature in large networks, although the proper naming conventions must be in place for it to work.

The marshal and deputies must run the Enterprise Administrator console to perform administrative tasks, but it can be run from a network share, which means it doesn't have to be loaded on every workstation.

Mission Critical reports one company using Enterprise Administrator administers 56,000 users in just three NT domains. Copying users and groups from one domain to another is a simple operation, and assigning the appropriate permissions to files and directories is also automated.

The reporting functions are extremely useful and also easy to use. NT system logs tend to be rather cryptic and generally not terribly useful. Enterprise Administrator translates existing logs into comprehensible English and maintains a great many more logs, allowing oversight of the network at a level that would otherwise require separate network-analysis and security-analysis tools.

OnePoint EA is a new version, released too late to test, that includes Enterprise Administrator and Enterprise Event Manager, and adds a number of substantial features, including ADSI compatibility, Exchange administration, Web-based administration, and automated migration to an Active Directory hierarchy.

Conclusion
Whatever directory service you eventually intend to implement, the most critical thing is not so much the software as the hierarchical structure and the planning. My own recommendation to administrators is to begin planning well in advance. There are some good books, mostly oriented toward NDS, but they all provide good information on planning the directory structure, which is the hardest part. Given the interoperability of the different directories, it may be a good idea for NT network managers to try one of the products available now and then to take advantage of the migration tools to move to Active Directory when it's available.

DirectManage from Entevo and Novell's NDS are best suited to networks that include Novell NetWare and NT systems. They both provide good integration of NDS with NT domains and Active Directory, when it becomes available. DirectManage can administer Exchange, as well as additional reporting and scripting tools, while NDS for NT is somewhat less expensive and offers completely seamless integration with NDS networks.

DM/Suite and Enterprise Administrator are best suited for NT-only networks, and both are strong contenders for administrators who need to consolidate many domains in preparation for Active Directory, as well as providing a directory ser-vice now, without waiting for the release of Windows 2000, or upgrades of existing NT 3.51 and 4.0 servers.