New tool quickly creates apps that enable users to interact with NDS
 
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I ran into my old friend John McCann at NetWorld+Interop 99. You may know John as the author of "Site Meter," the first licensed metering solution for NetWare, or as a founder of the "NetWire" forum on CompuServe. But right now, John is busy promoting his new software company, Visual Click Software, and if you're an IT manager and you're running NDS as your directory service, John's got a real winner for you. (Those of you who run Microsoft's Active Directory will have to wait until next year for this utility, but you will want it.)
Click:VISION Manager is, essentially, a software development environment. But there's no programming involved. A few mouse clicks let you design applications that you can distribute to other users to enable them to interact with NDS in just the way you want them to.
For example, suppose you'd like your help desk personnel to be able to reset user passwords for users who forget them. A few mouse clicks gives the proper rights to the help desk group, assigns all users as the target and limits the action to change password. In less than five minutes, the screen is drawn, with a dropdown list of users, an entry box for the new password and a button to click to change it. That's it. Give all help desk personnel access to this and they can change passwords - without all of the complexity (or possible security problems) associated with giving them access to the NetWare Administrator console.
If you need to allow some help desk personnel to reset intruder lockout status, as well as to be able to change passwords, just call up the password changer application (what I described above), add another button to reset intruder lockout, change the permissions on the operator (so that they can access the intruder lockout attribute) and you're done. Maybe two more minutes.
And that's just a tiny subset of the things you could do with Click:VISION Manager. You can design your own utilities to cut through the wealth of information in NDS so that you can hone in on what's important. You can create forms and report screens for others without having to give them access to objects and properties that they could compromise. Click:VISION Manager is easy, it's quick and it will save you time.
Virtual Quill is a writing agency serving the computer and networking industries. If your target customer doesn't know your product, doesn't know its uses and doesn't know he needs it, he's not going to buy it. From books to reviews, marketing to manuals, VQ can help you and your business. Virtual Quill - "words to sell by..." Find out more at www.vquill.com, or by email at info@vquill.com.
Visual Click Software's Web site
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