"Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm." – Syrus Publilius
Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform got a small update last week when they added PowerShell commands allowing users to manage services hosted on the platform. Ryan Dunn of Microsoft said on his blog that the pack called the Windows Azure Service Management cmdlets (WASM) were built to give people working with Azure an API to automate basic service managment tasks. http://dunnry.com/blog/WASMCmdletsUpdated.aspx
Posted in Active Directory.
Following up on the US East Coast and Berlin User Group on April 28th, 2010 we are holding another ActiveRoles Server user group at the Quest’s The Expert Conference. For more detail go to http://www.theexpertsconference.com/agenda-speakers/quest-user-groups/
Posted in Active Directory.
I have had a lot of questions about when the next version of the ActiveRoles Management Shell for AD (a.k.a. Quest AD CMDLETs) would be released. I don’t have an exact date, but I wanted everyone to know that we are working on our next release and should have a beta in the next 60 days or so.
The focus of the next version will certainly have a security centric theme around certificate management as this seems to be an area that has not been effectively covered by anyone in PowerShell up to this point. I won’t go into details in this post, but I will provide another update next week with more details – so stay tuned!
Posted in Active Directory.
If you are not familiar with this, he IE View add-in for FireFox allows Microsoft Internet Explorer pages to be rendered better within FireFox. At the end of January Paul Roub released a new version (IE View 1.4.5.1) to Mozdev.org to resolve questions about compatibility with FireFox 3.6.
Posted in Active Directory.
This is clever… wish I had thought of it. Go to Google and enter Find Chuck Norris then click I feel lucky.
Posted in Bobel.
Accompanying the Quick Connect 4.5 release last week we also made public a Technical Preview of our SAP connector. This connector will allow Quick Connect to directly pull authoritative SAP HR data and use it to provision other systems. This technical preview is pre-release software and as such should not be used in a production environment.
The connector will also provision base SAP accounts, set passwords for those accounts and assign SAP roles. In combination with ActiveRoles Self-Service Manager you can now allow people within your organization to request access to SAP modules/resources through the a approval driven self-service process.
Posted in Active Directory.
I stumbled upon a really interesting article about how Unity Partnership (a venture between Mouchel and Oldham Councils in the UK) was deploying ActiveRoles Server to provide group provisioning and to control management rights for the staff and students. To read the article here.
Posted in Active Directory.
Quest Password Manager is capable of integrating with Quick Connect to leverage its functionality and enable users, help desk operators, and administrators to more efficiently manage passwords across multiple data sources in the enterprise. When a user in Password Manager views their profile they can be given the option of individually changing individual passwords on Quick Connect connected systems or have those passwords synchronized with their Active Directory password. This provides a single location for users to manage all their enterprise passwords.
Posted in Active Directory.
Last week I forgot to mention that we renamed our Exchange Resource Forest Manager module to Quick Connect for Exchange Resource Forests and updated it to support the latest version of Exchange and ActiveRoles Server. This module extends the multi-forest management capability of ActiveRoles Server to synchronize and provision accounts between a User Account Forest and the Exchange Resource Forest. Additionally, Exchange properties are projected from the Resource Forest onto the property pages of users in the User Forest for single point user account management.
Posted in Active Directory.
I am pleased to announce that later today, Quick Connect 4.5 will be made Generally Available (GA)to the public. You can now download the bits from http://www.quest.com/common/registration.aspx?requestdefid=20088.
What’s New: Password Synchronization – Quick Connect can synchronize passwords between Active Directory and some categories of connected systems. Active Directory and connected systems are governed by different access policies. Consequently, users need to maintain different user accounts and different passwords on these systems.
Maintaining several passwords on several different systems is a hassle for users and administrators. Quick Connect provides for Quick Connect Capture Agent to be installed on all domain controllers in the source Active Directory connections. Capture Agent tracks changes that were made to user password in Active Directory, and then Quick Connect Sync Engine synchronizes the passwords basing on this information.
What’s New: Re-designed Sync History Log – The Sync History feature of the application allows you to view reports on the performed synchronization workflow runs. The Sync History tab allows you to display a list of all performed synchronization workflows runs, and then view the report on the workflow run of interest. In addition to this possibility, the new version of the Sync History tab allows you first to filter the synchronization reports for all object pairs using some filter criteria, and then select the report to view.
What’s New: Additional Rules for Synchronizing Multi-valued attributes – In Quick Connect 4.0 we provided multi-attribute synchronization but we found we needed more options. Group and role assignments are often stored using multiple values in a single attribute and many traditional provisioning solutions are limited single value attribute provisioning . Flexible multi-value capability allows roles and groups to be synchronized between systems. For example, you may want to synchronize an SAP Role to an Microsoft Exchange Distribution List so you can easily email those individuals. Without multi-value capability coordinating such seemingly simple lists becomes very-very difficult.
Posted in Active Directory.
