I’m listening to an interesting webinar about backing up and recovering Active Directory. They make a lot of great points about why to buy a third party tool instead of relying on built in free tools. I’m sure they’re right but one of the things that caught my attention is that the built in free…
Our blog usually addresses a technical audience, but this time my message is a bit more focused on one of the business units that IT supports. Human Resources and IT can and should work together. As I have written before, the roles of the organizations are somewhat similar, and they often must work together. What…
This is one of my favorite case studies because it solves two common problems, keeping both IT and end users productive. Managing Active Directory can take up a lot of IT’s time, making sure that users and groups are accurate and useful. And when IT’s manual processes miss something, end users’ productivity goes down. “With nearly…
I just read a great article by Rick Vanover called, Windows security groups: To nest or not? He asks the question because a nested security can be a bear to troubleshoot if you start getting quirky permissions issues. In the article Rick states, “I would love to say that nesting group membership is prohibited, but there are…
Every once in a while I find myself describing a dynamic Active Directory group as “query based.” This always begs the question, how does this dynamic group differ from Microsoft Exchange’s Query Based Distribution List (QBDL)? It is actually a pretty simple answer, when GroupID Automate creates a dynamic group, it actually creates the group…
I follow Twitter pretty closely. I use it to keep up with what the intelligentsia are saying about Active Directory, what new products are coming out, and generally the scuttlebutt on the industry. I follow analysts, customers, writers and most importantly directory services MVPs. So I was a little surprised to see this comment recently:…
A search on the term “Active Directory” in Twitter brought up this item this morning: I have written about an Active Directory bad word filter before and just find it funny that within a week there is the perfect example of why you need a filter for Active Directory groups. Of course, this twitterer is…
A Virtual Private Network or VPN, is a technology that helps you establish an encrypted environment on your network so that when you access the World Wide Web, your system is safe and secure from prying eyes. In addition to this, VPN also facilitates in hiding your IP address so that you can visit websites…
So you have decided to delegate Active Directory management to your end users, resolving that they know who should be in their AD groups better than the help desk ever will. The thing is, users keep lists: department lists, lists of people who help plan office parties, lists of department assistants, et cetera. When giving the…
We had our customer advisory committee meeting today where we discuss product priorities with a select group of customers. This is part of the Agile Methodology where a group of stakeholders help set priorities and define what features should look like. As always, Active Directory group lifecycle was discussed; we are looking at new and…