Synching user accounts/passwords between servers

My company has different OSes running (Windows, NetWare, Linux, etc). As we grow larger, handling the growing number of user accounts/password issues will become an issue at some point. What are our options to make things easier?Identity Integration Server 2003, which allows Active Directory to communicate with other LDAP-based systems for sharing user name and password information. This will be running SQL Server to handle integration duties. This means the server will need to be somewhat beefy depending on the user information you’re handling and the number of OSes you’ll be talking to. If you haven’t worked with SQL before, you will want to get some basics, such as doing database backups, under your belt so you can quickly recover if there’s a problem.eDirectory option has been out for several years and uses the eDirectory database already in place for Novell Directory Services. Depending on how fancy you want to get in terms of making changes to a user’s account when they’re moved from one container to another you may need to look at Novell’s DirXML offering. That will put tools in place that will allow first-level help desk folks to handle some of the tasks your more experienced people have to handle now.

– Via the Internet

Microsoft just announced a new product by the name of

Novell’s 

There are other products available from third-party vendors. When looking at these, it’s important to find out what OSes they support and what has to be installed on the various OSes that you want to be centrally linked to the “master” database of user IDs and passwords. Also see what type of a centralized console they can give you to be able to handle rights assignments to resources without having to jump to another console. As with any implementation of this type, strongly consider setting up a test environment that as much as possible identically resembles your production network so you can get an idea of how things will work and select the best possible product for your needs.