MONTEREY, Calif-Microsoft, with its upcoming Active Directory product, is promising a comprehensive network directory for enterprises that will send critical system information cascading throughout a network, according to a company official who spoke at the FastLane DM/World conference on Wednesday.
The official, Peter Houston, Microsoft lead product manager at Active Directory, outlined Active Directory's features and future and announced that the heavily anticipated product still is expected to ship before the end of the year.
"Active Directory is largely inseparable from Windows 2000," Houston said. "It's part of the operating system and it does three important things-it serves as a focal point for network management, it's a trust repository of security information, and it becomes part of the platform."
Houston highlighted several Active Directory components, including the "global catalog," which carries a set of data to multiple domains for easy access to information such as passwords and user names, and Active Directory's multimaster replication, allowing automatic directory and database updates across WAN networks.
Houston also focused on meta directory components of Active Directory, which are based on Zoomit's Via technology. Microsoft acquired Zoomit in July, a move that David Waugh, vice president of marketing at FastLane Technologies, said is a tacit acknowledgement that Active Directory will not be the main enterprise directory in the market and that interoperability between multiple directories is becoming more critical.
Via technology will allow updates to Active Directory to automatically flow out to various directories and applications for a measure of integration with multiple directory and database types. Plans have called for it to be embedded into Active Directory around its second release, according to Houston. However, Houston also announced that Microsoft is thinking about changing its Via release timeline, and the technology will be available to users "very soon" because of the need for directory interoperability.
Along with the meta directory functions, identity management will loom large for Active Directory.
"The single biggest thing I see in Active Directory's future is a greater role in enterprise management in identity management," Houston said, noting that more and more devices are becoming directory-enabled in the enterprise market and that companies are more likely to have multiple products in use at their site.
"We realized that if we didn't go out and integrate with existing investments, that would ultimately delay the implementation of Active Directory," Houston said.
Houston also acknowledged that Active Directory and Windows 2000 implementation will be time-consuming.
"Most companies are moving toward one of the biggest data management challenges they've ever seen. You've got to treat these [directory] rollouts like an enterprise deployment project-it is no less important than any other mission-critical application," Houston said. "If you don't start thinking now about how you're going to manage these directories, it's going to get out of hand."
Microsoft Corp., in Redmond, Wash., is at www.microsoft.com.
This story from Infoworld.com Copyright © 1999 InfoWorld Media Group, Inc.
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