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http://www.quest.com/privilege... http://www.liebsoft.com/ http://www.thycotic.com/produc... All of these support multi-user / groups of users access. That is what you actually want. And yes, they cost money, but if you are in IT and need password management, and don't want to pay any money, find a better employer!

"Google Health has been discontinued"

2012 was the Year of the Cloud Going Away. Several major service vendors bailed completely. GoDaddy dropped their cloud service last October, Dell discontinued their Quest Cloud Automation Platform and Harris dropped theirs last February.

On the consumer side, where the contracts are heavily biased towards the vendor, it's worse. Apple dropped MobileMe, and Google dropped a long list of products. Windows Live Mesh shuts down February 13, 2013.

When cloud services die, they tend to die fast. A business which relied on a "cloud" service can be in big trouble. The best case is a frantic effort to get the data off and move to some alternative. Worst case is the data gets lost.

There was no mention in the grandparent post about migration... But if you want to bring it up; do the math... That's about 14 hours, so you remote in and move everyone's mailboxes on a fri night or a sat and check in a couple of times on the weekend. If you're really worried about it, there is tools from Quest to help:

http://www.quest.com/exchange-uc/

*shrug* still don't see the big deal here....

It doesn't. There's some infrastructure in place, but nothing close to the out of box simplicity and functionality of AD and Group Policy.

While agreed, it's not out of the box, there are AD solutions for LInux. http://www.quest.com/identity-management/

There's also distribution tools and models for ease of distribution. http://www.puppetlabs.com/

And let's not forget a centralized intrusion detection system. http://www.la-samhna.de/samhain/

Plenty of tools available for system distribution, and no need to 're-invent the wheel' or 'roll their own' to do so. So productivity generally includes installing these tools, configuring them, then globally distributing them based on preset configurations to all the other servers.

We use a lot of the tools above, and many others, to be able to rebuild a system, with a unique configuration, unique mount points, unique application and databases, and can generally go from bare-bone box to live server in under 20 minutes.

Ever had a look at this?

http://www.quest.com/Authentication-Services/

A very nice product that offers integration of Unix/Linux machines into AD!

For Windows, the default answer for deploying configuration is Group Policy. With the Group Policy Management Console you can back up your GPOs and store them in your version control system. Alternatively, you can use a specialized Group Policy version control and troubleshooting product like Group Policy Manager from Quest which allows offline editing and testing before deployment to your production environment.

You can actually extend Group Policy to your *nix and Novell machines as well using Vintela Group Policy (a part of Vintela Authentication Services), which also has features to allow your *nix machines to use your Active Directory accounts. If you use it in combination with Group Policy Manager, you can back up the *nix specific settings alongside the rest of your GPO. Also, the integration allows you to diff different versions of your *nix settings alongside the rest of your GPO.

[Disclaimer: I am a developer on the Group Policy Manager team at Quest. While I'm proud of my product, I'm not any kind of official spokesperson for my employer.]

For Windows, the default answer for deploying configuration is Group Policy. With the Group Policy Management Console you can back up your GPOs and store them in your version control system. Alternatively, you can use a specialized Group Policy version control and troubleshooting product like Group Policy Manager from Quest which allows offline editing and testing before deployment to your production environment.

You can actually extend Group Policy to your *nix and Novell machines as well using Vintela Group Policy (a part of Vintela Authentication Services), which also has features to allow your *nix machines to use your Active Directory accounts. If you use it in combination with Group Policy Manager, you can back up the *nix specific settings alongside the rest of your GPO. Also, the integration allows you to diff different versions of your *nix settings alongside the rest of your GPO.

[Disclaimer: I am a developer on the Group Policy Manager team at Quest. While I'm proud of my product, I'm not any kind of official spokesperson for my employer.]

For Windows, the default answer for deploying configuration is Group Policy. With the Group Policy Management Console you can back up your GPOs and store them in your version control system. Alternatively, you can use a specialized Group Policy version control and troubleshooting product like Group Policy Manager from Quest which allows offline editing and testing before deployment to your production environment.

You can actually extend Group Policy to your *nix and Novell machines as well using Vintela Group Policy (a part of Vintela Authentication Services), which also has features to allow your *nix machines to use your Active Directory accounts. If you use it in combination with Group Policy Manager, you can back up the *nix specific settings alongside the rest of your GPO. Also, the integration allows you to diff different versions of your *nix settings alongside the rest of your GPO.

[Disclaimer: I am a developer on the Group Policy Manager team at Quest. While I'm proud of my product, I'm not any kind of official spokesperson for my employer.]

No i didn't RTFA, but one of my biggest concerns has always been remote central management in the enterprise structure. IT can't always make "house calls" to each and every computer, there has to be ways of remotely accessing, configuring and maintaining the systems and I haven't seen much that supports OSX. Even with Linux there are tools that allow you to do that, and most all central configuration tools are Windows based.

Good luck with that -- migrating from Groupwise to Exchange was fun enough, with lots of tools that make it "seamless" *cough*. Again, $wonderWebAppName completely fails to understand the real issues with new technology adoption in the Real World(tm): data migration.

On MS Exchange this is easy.

1. Enable mailbox login auditing
2. Report on audit log entries with MOM

Auditing is only the first step. It does not stop the person from taking a backup copy of the Exchange databases home and export the mail with Quest Recovery Manager for Exchange.

So, even if you lock down your company like a government secure networks it all comes back to trust. They run background checks and grant security clearances for a reason. I have mine.

http://www.quest.com/benchmark_factory/

It will help create, manage and then run tests against the Databases...

i work for a company that handles large enterprises single sign on and user id consolidation needs... (as well as small/medium ones as well)

you are right on... when it comes to compliance and SOX requirements, getting all of your machines authenticating against one directory (AD or otherwise) makes perfect sense. I am sure there are a few sys admins here who have been asked for login failure and share access permissions across all of their network machines. adding more 'directories' makes it even more fun to gather these reports, comb through logs, look for changes across all the flavors of *nix and then the msft event logs, even network syslog...

There are a few companies out there who have built product lines that allow unix machines to authenticate against AD, their machine accounts can have Windows Group Polices and managed under one single console, they have the ability to appear in SMS as any other machine for reporting and hardware inventory and also to send their performance metrics over to MSFT MOM...

Why in the HELL would anyone want to authenticate against AD? well, it is simple really.. MSFT DID do the LDAP/Kerberos thing right and have been doing it right for a long time. They also have the whole pass-through, single id thing going and it works just fine in AD (when its an all windows network)... and its EVERYWHERE... how many LARGE companies are using whitepages/ldap type directories for authentication and how many are using AD? its a valid question to ask and what is happening is that most ARE already on AD or are moving to AD and they ARE using Exchange and this put AD into a space of being one of the main components of an enterprise. So why not just toss the unix machines in there as well?

yes, it empowers windows AD... but the first solution below (from quest) does not take anything out of the unix guys bag of tricks... in fact it allows for the unix guy to actually do things against AD that before was a pain to setup/admin...

anyway... sunday, should be out walking the dog and playing frisbee with the kids or working on my short game... check out http://www.quest.com/landing/?ID=531 or http://www.centrify.com/ for some good info on two companies that are doing this for the *nix world now...

I like JProbe. It's a little cumbersome to setup, but has great analysis tools with graphical call trees, call stack drill-down, etc. What I like the best is the ability to prune the results interactively to isolate the piece of code you are interested in.

At the time, I told a colleague senior developer and was absolutely amazed when Quest offered Henrik a job. He immediately said: "I think they're going to kill it". I thought he was being an old mouldy and complaining senior developer, but hey he was right...

Quest's Spotlight series are both functional and have a pretty snazzy UI. When I was demoing their Sql Server and Windows monitors, co-workers thought I was playing a game. All that eye candy is pretty taxing on processor usage, though - so you may need a dedicated box to pump it out in high res glory.

Quest's Spotlight series are both functional and have a pretty snazzy UI. When I was demoing their Sql Server and Windows monitors, co-workers thought I was playing a game. All that eye candy is pretty taxing on processor usage, though - so you may need a dedicated box to pump it out in high res glory.

Quest's Spotlight series are both functional and have a pretty snazzy UI. When I was demoing their Sql Server and Windows monitors, co-workers thought I was playing a game. All that eye candy is pretty taxing on processor usage, though - so you may need a dedicated box to pump it out in high res glory.

God, I never realized before...Oracle client tools suck!

On MySQL, you get phpMyAdmin, which is a pretty spectacular application for free. The mysql CL tool is also pretty handy.

Even MS SQL Server has some very nice frontends.

Where are ya at Oracle?

TOAD is pretty good...I guess. Can't you get that for free? Though I got so much spam from Quest software that I got jaded.

http://www.quest.com/oracle/index.asp

If you didn't know, Quest software has a real hard-on for Oracle.

JClass from Quest Software (formerly Sitraka) is a package of Java classes to create charts. You had the option to pay extra to get the source code.

This was a couple of years ago. I'm not sure if they will have the same licensing terms.

Nonetheless, despite being obviously a small-fry customer, the Verizon rep called to let me know that in the past month I had received in excess of 800 text messages. My phone is at the receiving-end of a pretty large Big Brother monitoring system, so I'm not surprised.

He was calling me to offer to upgrade me to a $9.99/month plan for 1,000 text messages, and to do so at once to avoid overage charges on my account.

That's what I consider to be impressive customer service. I've been with other cellular providers in the past, and Verizon is the first one that actually seems to care about keeping me as a customer.

Consider me a satisfied Verizon customer.

As numerous people have pointed out, 100K of objects per session is insane.

There are dozens of tools out there you can use to track down the bottlenecks in your code.

http://www.quest.com/jprobe

http://www.quest.com/performasure

http://www.borland.com/optimizeit/index.html

http://www.wilytech.com

Any of these tools, along with a competent developer/analyst, can improve your app performance. I used to teach classes on Java performance tuning at one of these companies and I saw people get huge performance improvements from very simple changes - once they knew what to change.

As numerous people have pointed out, 100K of objects per session is insane.

There are dozens of tools out there you can use to track down the bottlenecks in your code.

http://www.quest.com/jprobe

http://www.quest.com/performasure

http://www.borland.com/optimizeit/index.html

http://www.wilytech.com

Any of these tools, along with a competent developer/analyst, can improve your app performance. I used to teach classes on Java performance tuning at one of these companies and I saw people get huge performance improvements from very simple changes - once they knew what to change.

Try Qwest. A sales rep from there kept bugging me about Covad was going down (I'm with Covad on their business DSL... SDSL to be exact) and I asked Qwest about their policy with static IPs.

For a one time fee of 50 bucks, I can get a block of five. (That's the same deal I made with Covad.) Now that Covad is defiantly going bunkrupt, I better call Qwest tomorrow :)

BTW... that wasn't the only reason I'm moving over to Qwest... Covad doesn't offer 512/512 and dropped me from 768/768 down to 384/384 because they say that Pacbell re-routed the phonelines... now I'm even further from the CO :(