Although the final version of Entevo's DirectManage 2.0 will not be ready until later this month, we beta-tested the product to see if the company is headed in the right direction.
The main migration component in this suite is called DirectMigrate 2000. In addition to offering NT domain consolidation and NT domain-to-Active Directory migration services, DirectManage also offers the ability to import directory information from Novell Directory Services. It also allows Active Directory-to-Active Directory migration. This feature is important - and unique to this product - because it will allow you to modify your existing Active Directory configuration. Unfortunately, the only pieces of this pending release ready for testing were the Account and Resource Migration Wizards. These wizards walked us through the migration preparation processes. We were able to select users and groups from the target domain and choose into which domain or Active Directory Organizational Unit we wanted them to migrate. The status of each migration is stored in a project file, which can be manipulated using the Resource Migration Wizard. Creating project files was sometimes cumbersome, but it allowed us to work on individual migration pieces, such as migrating all the sales people, separately. Once that has been completed successfully, we could create another project for migrating printer objects. We were able to do a large part of the migration with DirectMigrate, but there were still some gaps. For example, we were unable to test or use any reporting or management capabilities with Windows 2000. Entevo officials claim DirectManage 2.0 will include searching and reporting capabilities, so you can execute a query to find out quickly who hasn't logged on in the past 60 days or find all the workstations that are running NT 3.51, for example. The criteria you specify will be consolidated into a report. Administrators can review the reports and take actions from within the report itself. Applied to our example, this feature would all you to select the users who have not logged on for 60 days, highlight them and disable the accounts. This revision of the suite will also include a new version of Entevo's DirectAdmin tool. DirectAdmin 3.0 will let you delegate administrative tasks and divide your NT domains into an Active Directory-like hierarchy using Organizational Units in order to help you plan for the migration. RELATED LINKSReview: Active Directory migration tools
Network World, 8/16/99.
