Active Roles Blog Entries



Opposing opinions are good

Mar 19th, 2010   Bob Bobel

I ran across an interesting site that presents a different point of view on the various giants of the software industry. I found it extremely interesting and would recommend everyone at least take a peek at it. http://boycottnovell.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Microsoft Azure addes PowerShell Management

Feb 23rd, 2010   Bob Bobel

Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform got a small update last week when they added PowerShell commands allowing users to manage services hosted on the platform. Ryan Dunn of Microsoft said on his blog that the pack called the Windows Azure Service Management cmdlets (WASM) were built to give people working with Azure an API to [...]

TEC 2010 ActiveRoles User Group

Feb 16th, 2010   Bob Bobel

Following up on the US East Coast and Berlin User Group on April 28th, 2010 we are holding another ActiveRoles Server user group at the Quest’s The Expert Conference. For more detail go to http://www.theexpertsconference.com/agenda-speakers/quest-user-groups/

Quest AD PowerShell CMDLET BETA

Feb 11th, 2010   Bob Bobel

I have had a lot of questions about when the next version of the ActiveRoles Management Shell for AD (a.k.a. Quest AD CMDLETs) would be released. I don’t have an exact date, but I wanted everyone to know that we are working on our next release and should have a beta in the next 60 [...]

New IE View for Firefox posted

Feb 11th, 2010   Bob Bobel

If you are not familiar with this, he IE View add-in for FireFox allows Microsoft Internet Explorer pages to be rendered better within FireFox. At the end of January Paul Roub released a new version (IE View 1.4.5.1)  to Mozdev.org to resolve questions about compatibility with FireFox 3.6.

Funny Google search

Feb 11th, 2010   Bob Bobel

This is clever… wish I had thought of it. Go to Google and enter Find Chuck Norris then click I feel lucky.

Quick Connect for SAP Solutions – Tech Preview

Feb 10th, 2010   Bob Bobel

Accompanying the Quick Connect 4.5 release last week we also made public a Technical Preview of our SAP connector.  This connector will allow Quick Connect to directly pull authoritative SAP HR data  and use it to provision other systems. This technical preview is pre-release software and as such should not be used in a production environment. [...]

ActiveRoles Server added to 115 UK schools!

Feb 9th, 2010   Bob Bobel

I stumbled upon a really interesting article about how Unity Partnership (a venture between Mouchel and Oldham Councils in the UK) was deploying ActiveRoles Server to provide group provisioning and to control management rights for the staff and students. To read the article here.

Quick Connect and Quest Password Manager

Feb 9th, 2010   Bob Bobel

Quest Password Manager is capable of integrating with Quick Connect to leverage its functionality and enable users, help desk operators, and administrators to more efficiently manage passwords across multiple data sources in the enterprise. When a user in Password Manager views their profile they can be given the option of individually changing individual passwords  on [...]

Quick Connect for Exchange Resource Forests

Feb 8th, 2010   Bob Bobel

Last week I forgot to mention that we renamed our Exchange Resource Forest Manager module to Quick Connect for Exchange Resource Forests and updated it to support the latest version of Exchange and ActiveRoles Server.  This module extends the multi-forest management capability of ActiveRoles Server to synchronize and provision accounts between a User Account Forest [...]

Quick Connect 4.5 GA!

Feb 5th, 2010   Bob Bobel

I am pleased to announce that later today, Quick Connect 4.5 will be made Generally Available (GA)to the public. You can now download the bits from http://www.quest.com/common/registration.aspx?requestdefid=20088. What’s New: Password Synchronization – Quick Connect can synchronize passwords between Active Directory and some categories of connected systems. Active Directory and connected systems are governed by different access [...]

Old School threats still persist

Feb 3rd, 2010   Bob Bobel

Great article in Network world about how companies are chasing the latest threats, but failing to mitigate the older security flaws. It was funny to see that applications exposed to the Internetthat were poorly protected was still happening in this day and age especially with all the two factor and other access protection technology widely [...]

SUN Identity Manager Customers SOL?

Jan 29th, 2010   Bob Bobel

When IBM was bidding on SUN I posed the question…  Question: What do you get if IBM acquires SUN? Answer: IBM. The same joke appears to be coming true now that Oracle is completing acquisition of SUN. My colleague Jackson Shaw did a great job explaining the situation and sharing his incite on what this means to SUN [...]

Windows IT Pro Editor’s Choice: ActiveRoles

Jan 26th, 2010   Bob Bobel

Eric Rux at Windows IT Pro magazine took on the job of installing and reviewing a bunch of AD Administration and Provisioning products to help readers select the most comprehensive and complete solution. Eric compared four different products and to me it was no surprise that ActiveRoles came out on top as the clear winner.  What is [...]

Quick Connect 4.5 Goes Gold!

Jan 19th, 2010   Bob Bobel

Following up on our highly successful 4.0 release, 4.5 went gold last week. We are now going through the internal processes needed to release the product to the public next month. The biggest news about this release is that Quick Connect can synchronize passwords between Active Directory and connected systems. Active Directory and connected systems are [...]

Best Practicies: Distributed Deployment Scenario

Sep 17th, 2009   Ivan Levendyan

This 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 Levendyan

I 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 Levendyan

We 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 Levendyan

Let’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 Levendyan

Now 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 Levendyan

Hello 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   admin

We 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 Levendyan

This 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 [...]