April 03, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Centrify unites Group Policy and Mac (and more)
Suppose you're an IT admin at a Windows-centric shop, yet you want to bring Macs (or other non-Windows desktops) into the fold. Can you? Yes, Macs can be controlled mildly through an Apple server -- but you have an Active Directory domain using Group Policy. Rather than having to add a new server platform to your environment, you could turn to a company called Centrify.
Centrify offers "comprehensive Active Directory-centric auditing, access control, and authentication for Unix, Linux and Mac systems and applications," as the company describes it wares. It's a mouthful, that's true, but it doesn't even come close to explaining all the impressive sides to Centrify software.
I had an opportunity to speak with David McNeely, the director of product management at Centrify the other day. He explained the hundreds of Group Policy settings that can be applied to a Mac through Windows Server using the Centrify software. In other words, no Apple server is required. More settings are added as Apple releases information on how to hook into those items.
Want to learn more? Check out the Centrify site and register for a Webinar that will be given by David, as well as Jeremy Moskowitz, the lead GP guru and author of a fantastic Group Policy book. It's so good, in fact, that for the fifth edition, they had to split it in two parts!
Posted by J. Peter Bruzzese on April 3, 2008 03:00 AM
November 28, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft SQL Server Preview Rolls in More BI Features
With its latest generation of enterprise platform elements, Microsoft has taken the "customer technology preview," or CTP, to a whole new level, releasing waves of new features into the hands of evaluators. Perhaps the best example of that is the series of SQL Server 2008 previews.
Ironically, the latest Microsoft SQL Server 2008 CTP was released on November 12, the same day that news of the IBM acquisition of Cognos broke. Both the latest SQL Server CTP and the Cognos acquisition are signs of how BI features continue to be bundled into the database server -- reducing the breathing room for tools vendors who have stayed focused on reporting.
IBM bought Cognos, SAP bought Business Objects, and Oracle bought Hyperion -- leaving SAS as the last remaining major enterprise BI player not yet in the belly of a major database applications player. But most of this movement has been to prop up larger players.
Microsoft, meanwhile, has built on its own BI market share with the completion of its acquisition of ProClarity last year and the release of its PerformancePoint Server 2007 for the "executive dashboard" view of BI, building out from the "data mart" approach that won Microsoft its leading share of the BI market in the first place.
Microsoft refers to the collective BI features of SQL Server 2008's previews as "Pervasive Insight." New in the November CTP are tools for creating more optimized analysis cubes and cross-database aggregations, added atop a pile of potentially performance-boosting technologies. And SQL Server can certainly use the help there, as its performance in OLAP and MOLAP queries is often poor, and optimizing SQL Server performance is a bit of a dark art.
But can another set of wizards really fix that issue? I'm not so sure. What the tools could do effectively is keep novice users from really screwing up cube query sets, and that in itself should be something of a performance boost for many of Microsoft's OLAP users. It also might be just enough to keep them from wandering off to find something else.
Posted by Sean Gallagher on November 28, 2007 03:00 AM
November 07, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Oslo: Microsoft's SOAP opera, continued
Back in June 2000, I went to Microsoft's Forum 2000 event in Redmond, Wash., where the company rolled out its strategy surrounding SOAP and the .Net platform. It was Microsoft's first big step toward interoperability, taking the work of people such as Dave Winer and Don Box and moving Windows's COM+ middleware architecture beyond the boundaries of the operating system in a way that seemed genuinely exciting.
Now, Microsoft has committed itself once again to reaching beyond Windows with a renewed investment in the tools that make up the core of its middleware strategy, labeled Oslo. The .Net platform has exceeded the expectations of many. SOAP now extends far beyond what Microsoft had in mind when it called it "simple," having become the core of the WS-I's (Web Services Interoperability Organization's) standards.
And BizTalk, the "orchestration" server that many analysts marginalized as being strictly for entry-level enterprise application integration, is second only to IBM's WebSphere in terms of market share (according to WinterGreen Research) and implementations of "mission critical" application integration (according to an IDC study commissioned by Microsoft [PDF]), published last August.
Still, there's good reason for Microsoft to be concerned about its place in a world driven by SOAs. For one thing, there's the risk of commoditization. The market force that used to make Microsoft successful now works against it to some degree, with BPM systems now available from JBoss and others as open source. Despite .Net's success, integrating it alongside Java-based services and applications and other SOA systems is hardly a cakewalk for Microsoft customers. BizTalk doesn't speak the same modeling language as other BPM environments.
And with a lack of SOA management capabilities, Microsoft's been mostly a side road on many enterprise buses and not the main track. Despite the .Net plug-in profligation, Microsoft has been vulnerable to accusations that .Net and BizTalk are "lightweight."
Microsoft's commitment to business modeling language interoperability and its Internet Service Bus concept are essential to the future of Windows as an architectural element in the enterprise. The big problem is, other than a couple of quick demos, there wasn't a lot of substance on which to base strategic decisions now.
So it wouldn't be overly cynical to say that Microsoft is pledging to play on a bigger field partially to prevent customers from shifting their focus to someone with product already in place. Much of what was discussed as part of Oslo was technology that sounded a lot like the "magic software" already mentioned in the form of the Dynamic Systems Initiative, which Microsoft rolled out in 2003.
Will the technology in Oslo finally make Windows an equal citizen with other application platforms? Maybe. But it's not as though Microsoft really has any other choice in the long term, because if the company doesn't do that, someone else will for them.
Posted by Sean Gallagher on November 7, 2007 03:00 AM
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