Entevo, NetVision upgrade directory management for Windows 2000

By Christine Burns
Network World Fusion, 03/03/99

Windows 2000 Server won't be on the market for at least another six to nine months. But directory management tool vendors are lining up to tell corporate users how their tools will help ease the much-touted Active Directory service into their existing directory deployments.

Entevo of Arlington, Va., and Utah-based NetVision, were on the road this week explaining how their respective products will evolve so that administrators can use a single set of tools to manage Active Directory alongside Windows NT 4.0 domains and Novell Directory Services (NDS).

The need for cross-directory tools varies according to the NOS split in a corporation, says Bruce Robertson, a Houston-based industry analyst with Meta Group. "If somebody has mostly NT with only pockets of NetWare, then we expect them to migrate all the way to Active Directory and then you would just use the Microsoft tools," Robertson says. But if a company's got several thousand users on each system, "third-party vendors who can handle both directories are going to have a field day."

Which tool works better depends on which directory service a company has already bought into, he says. Entevo grounded its tool set in NT/Windows 2000 whereas NetVision's strength lies in its longstanding NDS expertise.

Entevo announced a new suite called DirectManage. This comprises a revision of its shipping product, DirectAdmin, and two new components, DirectAdmin NDS Plus Pack and DirectMigrate for NDS. This suite lets administrators deploy, administer and manage NT 4.0 domain, NDS and Active Directory information from one administrative console.

The DirectAdmin component provides the synchronization agents between the directories. The NDS Plus Pack provides the single GUI for adding, deleting and modifying entries across the Microsoft and Novell services. DirectMigrate lets a company that has selected Active Directory as its primary service port take information previously stored in NDS and put it into Active Directory.

The Social Security Administration is looking for a set of tools that will first help the agency consolidate its 10 NT domains and then migrate all of that user name and password information to Active Directory.

Ron Cooper, a computer specialist with the agency based in Baltimore, tested Entevo's product across seven NT domains. He was impressed with its ability to map user information across domains and then synchronize the data so that he could manage the information from one console.

The suite is available now. Pricing for the DirectAdmin Version 2.0, NDS Plus Pack and DirectMigrate is for $19, $10 and $5 per managed account, respectively.

NetVision's NDS vision

NetVision was on the road to talk about a new version of its NDS-based Synchronicity. But executives didn't hesitate to outline its two-pronged approach to tie NDS with Active Directory.

Synchronicity currently uses NDS as the primary directory for synchronizing user and password information across NT 4.0 domains, Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes and NetWare 3.X servers. NetVision agents sit on these disparate systems and report any changes in the directory databases back to NDS. This gives end users single sign-on capabilities. Administrators, then, only have to make changes in one directory and they are sent to the others automatically.

NetVision does not offer a single interface for managing all the systems but rather lets an administrator use whichever directory administration utility he is comfortable with, explains president Todd Lawson.

The newest version - Synchronicity 2.0 - has been upgraded to support pure IP networks, includes advanced reporting features and can resolve directory object naming conflicts across all platforms. It will ship at the end of the month and will cost $14 per user.

Lawson says NetVision will tackle Windows 2000 from two angles. First, when Active Directory ships, NetVision will offer a module similar to the existing one for NT 4.0 that will report all changes in Active Directory back to NDS. But for those companies that want to standardize on Active Directory, NetVision will offer a new version of Synchronicity that will use Microsoft's system as the primary service. It will then build modules for NDS, Notes, Exchange and others that will report back to Active Directory.