Posted 10:58 AM (0) comments

Write a caption - win some bucks

NetVision is holding a contest - write a caption for their cartoon and you could win $1000.

Piece of cake, you say. You doodle cartoons and captions all through the weekly staff meeting anyway - why not got money for it? Well, there are some qualifications:

"Entrants must be actively employed as an Active Directory administrator by a company with more than 100 employees at the time of submission."

Think of that, though, as limiting the competition. Go for it!

Labels: Active Directory, humor

Posted 8:16 AM (0) comments

Congratulations!

...to all my friends at NetPro and Quest who now will operate under the same banner. Quest, over the past 6 or 7 years, has slowly acquired a number of key players in the 3rd party Microsoft managed identity space from FastLane (back in 2000) through Vintela a couple of years ago. Each time, key players from the acquisition have come along to oversee integration and each time it seems to have gone off without a hitch.

Time will tell how the Experts Conference might be affected, but Quest has been involved there for a few years and I doubt they'll do anything to tamper with success (unlike, say, CSO and Digital ID World).

I wonder if NetPro CEO Kevin Hickey will trade in his Yankee pinstripes for Dodger blue?

Labels: acquisition, Active Directory, trade show

Posted 10:08 AM (0) comments

Dominant does not mean all-encompassing

Oracle's Nishant Kaushik took some heat ("Is AD really the dominant Identity Store out there?") for not caving in to the "Active Directory is everywhere" litany. Bravo!

What some off his detractors fail to realize is that there are few, if any, organizations with more than 100 users who use AD as their sole identity datastore. Identity data - which includes not only name, rank and serial number, but also all of the attributes associated with the identity - is stored in myriads of places which can be local to the user, somewhere in the enterprise, or out in the internet cloud. And AD has no mechanisms whatsoever for getting at that data.

A service or application which wishes to consume identity data could search all possible datastores - provided, of course, it knew where they were and what protocols they supported for exporting data. How much easier, though, for the application developer to hit one datastore for everything that's needed? That should call forth no arguement from the AD-boosters - that's the argument they're using. But, as I said, AD has no way to get the data out of all of those other datastores. One thing does, though - the virtual directory.

QED

Labels: Active Directory, virtual directory