They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so a youtube video of GroupID in action should be worth a thousand dynamic Active Directory security groups. As part of Imanami’s never-ending quest to bring AD group management to light for the marketplace, we recorded a short video how-to for automating AD security group membership…
Natively, Exchange and Active Directory allow for a limited set of capabilities around groups owning groups. If you are running in native AD mode, you can have built-in security groups manage distribution lists. Not bad, you can have all Exchange Admins manage distribution lists through Outlook or other examples like that. But it is limiting.…
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…
Active Directory Group types: universal groups, global groups, domain local groups I had been demonstrating how to manage the creation and automation of Active Directory security groups and distribution lists for months before I realized that I had no idea what the differences were between the three types of Active Directory groups: universal groups (UG),…
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…
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…
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…
Identity management has been defined by wikipedia (great source, I know, but bear with me) as: Identity management … is a broad administrative area that deals with identifying individuals in a system (such as a country, a network or an organization) and controlling the access to the resources in that system by placing restrictions on the…