* Results of NetPro's annual survey of Directory Experts Conference attendees
No matter what incentives (of both the carrot or stick variety) Microsoft offers, it still amazes me to see how many of you still have older, legacy systems in place.
NetPro’s annual Directory Experts Conference (DEC) is a gathering for those interested in Microsoft’s Active Directory. At each gathering, the participants are surveyed and the data is collected to help define the agenda for future meetings. At this year’s conference in March, it was found that over 50% of the 101 survey respondents still had Windows NT servers as active participants in their network. Over 50%.
The good news (from Microsoft’s perspective, at least) is that most of those respondents (94%) have already (64%) migrated to Windows server 2003 or plan to by year-end. That is, their Active Directory installation will be run on the Win 2003 installation but will still be controlling older servers back to Windows NT. The remaining folks all claimed to have plans to roll out Windows server 2003 by the end of 2006 – just in time for the next version of Windows server to be showing up.
An interesting side note arose in a question about what percentage of time the respondents spent on various Active Directory functions: directory administration; user support; planning; enforcing security; troubleshooting the directory; supporting audit/compliance issues; and monitoring/tuning performance.
Fully 13% of the survey takers claimed they spent over 100% of their time supporting Active Directory – that’s real dedication. And a large majority – 74% – reported they spent at least sometime on each of the seven functions. Of course, it just might be that many of the respondents had no quantifiable idea about how much time they spent on various aspects of the directory. Certainly, in one major area – one that vendors like to talk about – that inability to quantify showed up strongly. We’ll look at that in the next issue.
