Survey: U.S., European users split in use of Microsoft ADAM

Today we’ll continue to look at the results of the survey which NetPro took at its Directory Experts Conference (DEC) in Amsterdam late last month and compare the results with those of the same survey questions asked of North American DEC attendees in March. Today we’ll focus on the questions concerning Active Directory/Application Mode (ADAM) and Microsoft Identity Integration Server (MIIS).

Before getting to the questions, though, an important announcement about MIIS: I implied in an earlier newsletter (https://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/nt/2004/0503nt2.html) that MIIS doesn’t provide connectors to non-Microsoft technologies. Well, “implied” might be weak – I came right out and said so. That may have been true of MIIS’ precursor, Microsoft Metadirectory Services, but MIIS connects with quite a few non-Microsoft platforms (as product manager Jackson Shaw reminded me). In fact, it ships with connectors for:

* Active Directory

* Active Directory Application Mode

* Attribute value pair text files

* Delimited text files

* Directory Services Markup Language

* Fixed-width text files

* Global Address Lists (Exchange)

* LDAP Directory Interchange Format

* Lotus Notes/Domino 4.6 and 5.0

* Microsoft Windows NT 4 Domains

* Microsoft Exchange 5.5 Bridgeheads

* Microsoft Exchange 5.5, 2000, & 2003

* Microsoft SQL 7 and 2000 databases

* Novell eDirectory v8.6.2 and v8.7

* Oracle 8i and 9i databases

* SunONE/iPlanet/Netscape Directory

When the next service pack is released in late summer/early fall, support for IBM’s DB2 database and SecureWay directory server will be added.  Oops!

Back to the survey results, I’ll list the questions and note the choice of answers and the percentage of European (E%) and American (A%) responses to each answer.

Q: Do you plan to deploy Microsoft’s MIIS?

Yes……….E-52% A-61%

No………..E-44% A-33%

Maybe…..E-4%   A-10%

Q: Which data sources will you link with MIIS?

SQL……………………….E-22% A-33%

Active Directory……….E-44% A-59%

AD/AM………………….E-15% A-46%

Exchange………………..E-30% A-29%

Lotus Notes…………….E-7%   A-19%

Netscape………………..E-0%   A-9%

eDirectory……………….E-0%   A-9%

Other……………………..E-33% A-19%

Q: Do you plan to deploy Microsoft’s AD/AM (AD Application Mode)?

Yes……….E-19% A-46%

No………..E-78% A-32%

Maybe…..E-0%   A-8%

The big surprise here is the decided difference of opinion about Active Directory/Application Mode (ADAM) with the North Americans far ahead in their planning for its use. The Europeans appear to be lagging a bit in plans for MIIS, so perhaps don’t realize that MIIS requires Active Directory, but can use ADAM in places where AD is not the enterprise system. It will be very interesting to see how next year’s surveys change once knowledge about ADAM and its uses is more widely dispersed.