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Exchange 2010 — Are You Migrating?

Right after Exchange 2010 was released, I was quoted in Network World stating that none of our GroupID customers planned to move to it immediately.  I immediately received two responses, one customer contacted me on Twitter and said he was very soon.  And one guy stated in the comments that the obvious reason I said…

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Morale in the GAL – De-Provisioning Users in Active Directory

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…

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IT Productivity: Web-based Active Directory Management

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…

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Access Controls Leveraging Active Directory Groups

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…

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Healthcare Challenges: Managing Directories With Less Resources

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…

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Automated Provisioning Machine for Active Directory

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…

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Active Directory Token Bloat & Group Glut

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…

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Security Groups in SharePoint – Managing Access Dynamically

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…

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Managing Active Directory … Painful and Boring

In a recent survey, we found that managing groups in Active Directory is painful or very painful for 25% of respondents and only 6% found it to be no problem at all.  It’s pretty obvious why this is considered painful, 81% of all organizations have a manual process for managing Active Directory groups. And despite…