The example we gave when designing the group hijacking feature for GroupID was absurd. Say you owned an Exchange distribution list designed to discuss cookbooks and somebody else owned a distribution group designed to discuss the Anarchist Cookbook…very different sets of users with most likely a very different set of discussions. If the owner of the…
Active Directory is central to most IT infrastructures. You manage users, computers, groups, contacts, access, authentication, and lunch orders with it. Well, maybe not lunch orders but it wouldn’t be too hard with a good web-based self-service tool, some AD synchronization, and a fax gateway. The problem would eventually be: how do you report on…
In the last few years many organizations have been through at least one round of layoffs, reduction in force or organizational restructuring. Going through that process is painful and challenging in a host of ways, including the effects on the morale of the remaining employees. Organizations are running increasingly lean and in most cases the…
I hesitate to call a QBDL by its other name, QBDG, because it isn’t a group. In fact of all of the letters in the acronym “Q” is really the pertinent one. The reason is that a Query Based Distribution List isn’t a list or a group, it is a query and only a query. …
One of the primary responsibilities for IT is to actively help their organization’s users stay productive. If the overall workload required to do that is 100 units of help, you can bet that your organization’s current capacity is somewhat south of that number, most likely less than half. If your organization is like most, you…
I admit to being a big fan of Centrify so I was especially pleased to find this “chalktalk” they were giving on the same day that I was researching Group Based Access Control (GBAC). The premise of my research was that Role Based Access Control (RBAC) is too limiting, trying to fit a square user into…
We all know that the economy has cut IT staffing to the bone. While there seems to be some rebounding from the lows of last year, organizations are still running very lean. Healthcare IT organizations are in a particularly difficult place. At the same time that their IT staff has been cut to meet shrinking budgets…
In many organizations, Active Directory provisioning consists of a series of manual processes and emails and help desk calls that ultimately finish with an employee having a network login and hopefully an Exchange email account. It is ripe with potential for errors and just not a good use of limited resources. But then the problem…
One of the tricks of Active Directory management is the fine balance between usability for end users and performance. A great example of this is the usability of security groups. Active Directory security groups are an excellent tool for granting access to network resources. You could be tempted to load up a user with security…
SharePoint is becoming ever more popular, especially with the upcoming release of SharePoint 2010. SharePoint is an excellent tool for communication but we’re getting more and more questions about how to use Active Directory’s group structure to manage access. Large enterprises with thousands of users need a simpler way to manage SharePoint access. Some tips…