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 Products
SmartDL
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Intelligent Group Management
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Microsoft Exchange represents a powerful mail platform, delivering
not only a great messaging and groupware platform but also a robust
directory service. With the Microsoft directory services (Microsoft
Exchange and Microsoft Active Directory) come the ability to make
server-based distribution lists or groups. This means the server handles
list expansion, addressing a note to each recipient, but not displaying
the recipient's e-mail address in the header of the message. This
reduces header size and keeps list membership anonymous.
A further advantage of this approach is that only one list must be
maintained, rather than individual users maintaining their own lists.
Of course, this isn't of much comfort if you are the person responsible
for the list updates. And suddenly, the entire user base is exposed
to distribution lists, or "groups." This means that any
user can send an e-mail (either intentionally or not) to any group,
such as "All Users." Your messaging system can be put under
unnecessary strain as recipients "reply to all," asking
to be removed from the list. |
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So, how do you keep your groups' membership current and reliable?
a) You can hire employees and pay them to update and maintain groups.
b) You can continue to bog down your administrators with this chore.
c) You can create a custom application.
For efficiency-minded companies, increasing the workforce in order
to perform mundane tasks is hardly cost-effective, nor is it necessarily
productive to drown administrators with simple, tedious tasks when
they could be focusing on more critical IT issues. And creating a
custom application is much more expensive than purchasing a product
off the shelf. |
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The best answer to this dilemma is SmartDL, an application
that creates and updates Microsoft Exchange distribution lists and
Microsoft Active Directory groups through user-defined queries. SmartDL provides intelligent group management, allowing administrators
to easily maintain large groups without having to manually add or
remove members. Administrators tell SmartDL - just once - who should
be a member, and SmartDL updates automatically.
SmartDL takes intelligent group management to a new level by
allowing users to create SmartDL Dynasties, rules that define SmartDLs.
Dynasties automatically create, update, and delete groups based on
user-defined criteria. For example, if your organization requires
a group that contains everyone on a server, and there are five servers,
a group would have to be created for every server. If your company
added or removed servers, you would have to create or delete the corresponding
group each time. With a Dynasty called "Servers," SmartDL
determines how many servers are part of the environment and creates
or deletes groups when necessary, even populating them if empty.
With SmartDL’s scheduling feature, your group management solution
goes from being re-active to pro-active: instead of updating groups
when you notice that the membership is inaccurate, you can schedule
SmartDL to update them on a regular basis and never have to doubt
the precision of your group’s membership again. |
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Solve your group management woes!
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Consider the following…
1. Is it vital that the right information gets to the right people,
every time?
2. How important is it that my distribution lists are up-to-date?
3. What's my current risk of unnecessarily
flooding thousands of mailboxes
If you are tired of finding distribution list membership out-of-date,
if your administrators need relief from the tedious task of updating
your distribution lists, and if you want to be able to count on your
directory data, turn to SmartDL. |
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