Active Directory Management

[BOB IROC]

I am just looking to see what other techies out there use as management tools for Active Directory Environments. The School District I work for will be Migrating away from Novell this Spring/Summer and I want to get a heads up on some options before then.

Currently we are in the process of cleaning up our Netware file servers and Groupwise email accounts. This has proven to be a not so easy task as it is hard to find tools that work well with Novell to help us determine file information and such. One such program I came across was DSRAZOR which is made by a company called Visual Click Software. They have utilities for NDS/Netware as well as Windows Active Directory. I went through the demo with the NDS version because we are going to get a rental subscription on that to help us clean up a little. One of the nice things I learned about this program is you can take any of the modules and export them into an individual program and save them as an EXE. You can also do some level of custimization. So what that means is if you want certain people to create user accounts you can create and export a module for that and the person can just input the data into the fields of that module. I thought something like this may be very helpful in our environment as many of our Tech staff are not so tech saavy and if they use our current tool (ConsoleOne) they get confused easily and mess things up frequently. I know there is an Admin Pack that you can use with MS AD, but I am not sure if that is necessarily user friendly. If this DSRAZOR for Netware works out we may think about getting the DSRAZOR for Windows/AD as I was told it does the same thing.

So in short I was just looking for feedback to see what other people use to help them in areas like User Management, Network Storage Management, and Email Account Management etc...

[PuterGeekGirl]

We use Hyena, it allows us to do alot more, like manage things by selecting several items and making the change all at once...can't do that in AD.