ActiveRoles Server 6.5, Generally Available!
Nov 19th, 2009 Bob BobelI am extremely proud to announce the public release of ActiveRoles Server 6.5 with enhanced work-flow, extensibility and broader platform support. This release is accompanied by ActiveRoles Self-Service Manager 2.0 that both defines and enforces Access Accountability while streamlining access management providing sustained compliance. Congratulations and thank you to the collective Quest team for making this [...]
ActiveRoles Server 6.5 goes GOLD!
Nov 14th, 2009 Bob BobelA little earlier today I recieved the GOLD code for ActiveRoles Server 6.5, the next release in our wildly popular provisioning and administration platform. The public release is still a little way off, but it won’t be long now and the GOLD code will be used to perpare all the teams in Quest for unleashing [...]
ActiveRoles Self-Service Manager 2.0 is GOLD
Nov 14th, 2009 Bob BobelEarlier today I recieved the GOLD build of ActiveRoles Self-Service Manager 2.0 from development. This will be the build that is made public over the next week or so… stay tuned for release announcment. The part that I am most excited about is the area called My Access. My Access represents an addition to This page displays the Access [...]
Free PKI & Certificate Management Console
Nov 13th, 2009 Bob BobelDmitry Sotnikov recently blogged that PowerShell MVP Vadims Podāns has posted a CA Management Console that can be downloaded here. The solution based on PowerShell and runs in the PowerGUI console provides the following: Certificate Authorities management: CRL Distribution Points (CDP) Authority Information Access (AIA) settings Review CRLs Publish new CRLs Change CRL publishing periods including overlap settings Revoked Certificates Issued Certificates Pending requests Failed requests Issued certificate templates Revoke/unrevoke [...]
Gartner IAM – Keynote
Nov 10th, 2009 Bob BobelThe second speaker during keynotes at the Gartner IAM conference was Bruce Schneier who is chief security technology office for BT. The title of his talk was The Intersection of Identity, Privacy and Securityand it was fascinating. One comment that really struck home was about how organizations struggle with trying to implement RBAC at an [...]
10 hot new features of the ActiveRoles 6.5 platform
Nov 9th, 2009 Bob BobelAs we approach the release of ActiveRoles Server 6.5 I wanted to take a moment and let some of you know what changes we are making to the platform. Our goal for this release was to provide more out of the box functionality as well as make it easier for third parties to leverage ActiveRoles [...]
Kuppinger Cole’s Report on ActiveRoles
Oct 28th, 2009 Bob BobelKuppinger Cole produced a report covering the provisioning product I’ve been managing since 2004. The report paints a great picture of where Kuppinger Cole sees the product’s position in comparison to the rest of the market. Personally, it is very rewarding to see how well respected our product has become. (Read the report here)
Northeast User Group Meeting in progress
Oct 22nd, 2009 Bob BobelI took this photo during our lunch break. As you can see by trhe photo most people are thrilled to have me stop talking and given some great food.
Northeast ActiveRoles User Conference, Boston Oct 22nd
Oct 14th, 2009 Bob BobelThe fourth annual ActiveRoles Server User Conference is being held on Thursday,October 22 at the Marriott in Newton Massachusetts. If you are a current ActiveRoles customer you can register and join us as well as peers from Canada and New England, for a productive learning experience. It’s a great chance to share best practices, collaborate and increase your product [...]
New ADAC for Windows R2, missing Exchange features
Oct 13th, 2009 Bob BobelAlong with a number of great improvements in Windows Server 2008 R2 came a couple of surprises. For those of you who use the Active Directory Users and Computers console, an improved replacement has been added. This new interface makes many tasks easier and the technology underneath is PowerShell rather than ADSI, but some users [...]
Exchange 2010 declared Code Complete
Oct 9th, 2009 Bob BobelThe Microsoft team has announced on its blog that Exchange 2010 is code complete (meaning they have finished all the features and testing) and are preparing to release the product.
Security Issue in Windows Workflow Foundation
Oct 9th, 2009 Bob BobelWindows Workflow Foundation (WF) has a serious issue that means it is incompatible with the FIPS security standard; an important standard to many. When you run application based on WF on a secure system the workflow application will crash. (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928833/) The only workaround seems to be to disable security for the components of the application that use [...]
Microsoft says thousdands of MS-Live accounts hacked
Oct 5th, 2009 Bob BobelThe BBC reported that they had confirmed with Microsoft that thousands of Microsoft Live accounts were compramised then posted online. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8291268.stm
5 ways to drive provisioning & automation, ActiveRoles Demo
Sep 22nd, 2009 Bob BobelAs. Sr. Product Manger for ActiveRoles I was asked and will be giving a live web demo on Quest’s Active Directory provisioning and automating solution (ActiveRoles) this Wednesday, September 23rd at 11:00 AM EST. I would like to invite everyone to join me for this live web demo where you will see how ActiveRoles Server can [...]
Approvals using the Outlook Client Technology
Sep 17th, 2009 Bob BobelOne of the conversations I had during my week in Berlin was with Dimitry Kaganski a Sr. Architect here at Quest. He had been asked by a customer, why we were not using Microsoft Outlook Client built-in work-flow to allow Outlook users to click a button to approve or reject work-flow requests in ActiveRoles Server. [...]
Best Practicies: Distributed Deployment Scenario
Sep 17th, 2009 Ivan LevendyanThis is a second post concering ActiveRoles deployment best practicies and as proviously I have described centralized deployment scenario, let’s now talk about distributed one, that is each site has its own ActiveRoles Server instance and each instance is deployed with its own Configuration DB/ Management History DB and Web Interface/IIS:
Management History DB
Management History [...]
Best Practicies: Centralized Deployment Scenario
Aug 28th, 2009 Ivan LevendyanI want to share some knowledge from the upcoming Best Practices document.
As you might know from the ActiveRoles Sever Quick Start Guide document there are some typical deployment scenarios. Let’s talk about the centralized one.
Centralized scenario means that all ARS instances are deployed at single data center (say, in North America) and they manage all [...]
ARS Deployment Best Practicies
Aug 6th, 2009 Ivan LevendyanWe are now preparing the document which is supposed to answer typical questions on deployment and initial configuration of ActiveRoles Server, hoping that this would be valuable contribution to the community. The document is based on forum and wiki contents and is intended for those who are going to install, upgrade or just to gain [...]
Partially Cloudy
Jul 15th, 2009 Ivan LevendyanLet’s talk about such trendy thing as Cloud Computing. Now it is hardly to find an ITPro who had not heard about cloud and new potential it gives to the enterprise. Let’s put away all positive things and take a closer look at some technical aspects people are used to underestimate.
What about Identity and access [...]
Fault-tolerant post
Jun 2nd, 2009 Ivan LevendyanNow it is hardly to find an architecture that does not claim to be fault tolerant or even provides this feature. Let us take a look for example at fault-tolerance ideas to world economy…well, yeah, it’s too late for talks. Let us talk about fault tolerance in ActiveRoles instead.
In the same way Active Directory is [...]
ActiveRoles Best Practices and Performance
May 19th, 2009 Ivan LevendyanHello again!
A lot of our customers are asking ActiveRoles team…well, they do not directly ask “Why it is working so slowly?”or “Is my Celeron 800 with 128 MB of RAM is enough for running 10K environment?”, they rather ask about dull things like deployment, upgrade or operation best practices. Of course, we do not advice [...]
Feedburner Now Installed on ActiveRoles Blog
May 15th, 2009 adminWe are in the process of implementing Feedburner so that we can post views of the postings into the community site located at http://activeroles.inside.quest.com. Once this setup is complete, anyone will be able to get feeds through feedburner that you can put onto their own blog. If you are an activeroles enthusiast and [...]
First Post
May 8th, 2009 Ivan LevendyanThis is my first post so far and I before writing it I was in doubt what would be interesting to blog about. Really, there are so many cool things, but forgive me not writing about trendy cloud computing or Iphones
So, let us start with quite old, but still highly effective SPML, which stands [...]