But such opinions are by no means unanimous. Other customers say Microsoft Consulting Services is often spread too thin. "There are many key points in time where they don't always have the staff available," says Hamid Mirza, senior VP of research and development at Automatic Data Processing Inc., a $5.5 billion provider of financial and back-office services in Roseland, N.J.

Six months ago, ADP hired IBM to assist with application evaluation, benchmarking, and testing, and to serve as a conduit for Microsoft's Windows 2000 beta program. "Windows 2000 is in the throes of multiple release candidates and updates, which makes life complex for us," says Mirza, who's also chief technology officer for ADP's $750 million Dealer Services division, which provides computing, inventory, and training services for auto and truck dealers. "As Microsoft's environment becomes more complex, we can ill afford to lose time with on-the-job learning. IBM Global Services reduces the amount of experimentation," he says.

Windows 2000 is supposed to make system administration easier by automating tasks, but there's a catch: Taking advantage of certain features, in particular Active Directory, won't be easy. Microsoft has done away with the old Windows NT domain system, positioning Active Directory as the central store for every user and device profile on a network. Implementing Active Directory is likely to soak up months of consulting time as companies redesign networks and integrate applications to take advantage of it.

By Microsoft's admission, directory migration could be a drawn-out process. Businesses must upgrade NT domains before building commonly managed "forests," or attempting to reduce domains across a WAN. "We don't see people turning everything on and just going for it," says Gartner Group analyst John Enck. Compared with previous Microsoft upgrades, Enck adds, "It's a much slower rollout to get to the payoff."

And there are political implications, as well. "It's potentially a tough sell to management," says Brian Howard, a practice executive at Amdahl Corp., which is building up its Windows 2000 consulting practice. "There's still very much a mind-set that Windows is a desktop program and you can just toss it in."

The territorial lines and finger-pointing that exist in some IT organizations--infrastructure vs. application staff, datacenter vs. network administrators--are already hampering some Windows 2000 upgrade projects, Howard says. Those are some of the same reasons Microsoft customers wound up with a sea of directories in the first place.

Microsoft has invested in a pair of technologies to ease the transition. In June, it licensed a domain-migration tool from Mission Critical Software that it plans to ship this month as a free snap-in for Microsoft Management Console in Windows 2000. In July, Microsoft acquired Zoomit Corp., whose metadirectory application-integration software could enable Active Directory to serve as the store for enterprise resource planning and other applications.

Bechtel Corp., a $12.6 billion engineering, procurement, and construction company in San Francisco, is evaluating Zoomit for creating on-the-fly organizational charts to manage employees' office locations, phone numbers, and benefits through a single view. "We don't envision the Active Directory [alone] is all of that," says Mike McCaffrey, operating systems manager in Bechtel's computing infrastructure group.

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llustration by Robin Jareaux