Active Directory provisioning is a vague abstract term. Is a user provisioned once they have an AD account? Once they have an Exchange mailbox? Once they are in a few security groups? Or once they can do their job? I posit that it is once they can do their job. And that’s where the rub…
You run an IT department. No matter if it is big or small, you have to have a help desk. Your help desk is the public face of IT, the people that the rest of the company knows. So they call them. For everything. You know the problem with this, help desks are expensive to…
In attribute-based access control, access to resources is based on the attributes of a user, not from the resource owner specifically granting access to that user. The user proves their claim based on attributes associated with them rather than having joined a group and/or a role. Example of ABAC (Attribute based Access Control) A great…
Nobody’s Active Directory is perfect. And by “perfect” I mean with accurate identity information. Users are an ever-changing group, they switch jobs, last names, phone numbers, cubicles, departments, and projects. The users know this information but, guess what, IT doesn’t always. So Active Directory gets lonely and out of date. Eventually, nobody’s identity information is…
Active Directory literally sits in the middle of everything. As the King of IT Infrastructure, it holds the ceremonial middle spot in any server rack. Well, maybe I’m mis-using literally. But figuratively? You bet it sits in the middle of everything. We have carved out a niche as THE software solution for managing Active Directory…
While reading Gartner’s research paper titled, “Identity in SharePoint 2010” by Kevin Kampman, I was struck by one particular phrase that is at the heart of the Active Directory or SharePoint group debate: “visibility is not provided into domain group memberships; SharePoint administrators cannot directly examine the members of an Active Directory group, although it…