Unify - Microsoft Active Directory Manager

Active Directory (AD) is one of your company’s most critical resources, storing information about the network resources across domains, and providing central authentication and authorization services for your entire IT infrastructure.

Active Directory is synonymous with security. The AD objects that comprise the framework of structures forming Active Directory provide critical information on the properties of these objects. This includes schema, organization of these objects, access control, and security settings.

With all this power comes responsibility. Because each schema object is integral to the definition of Active Directory objects, deactivating or changing these objects can have serious consequences. As many of you know by experience, a schema object, once altered, will automatically propagate through your Active Directory infrastructure. You will then be forced to live with these changes because once they have been created or modified; they can only be deactivated — never deleted.

Misconfiguration of AD is the largest source of unplanned downtime. Small changes inexpertly made to AD can wreak havoc with your organization, cause significant downtime, and impair future operations. This includes the objects held within a domain that are grouped into Organizational Units (OUs) where group policies are applied in the creation of Group Policy Objects(GPOs).

Ensim Unify AD Manager is a component of Unify Enterprise Suite Edition. Ensim Unify is a system management framework aimed at protecting and insulating mission critical infrastructure tools such as Microsoft Active Directory (AD), Exchange, and Windows Mobile. Besides providing insurance against misconfiguration, Unify simplifies and improves management of these resources.

Ensim Unify was co-developed with Microsoft and is used to administer over 1.5M users

Ensim Unify protects Active Directory.

All administrators know that access to AD is not for everyone and protecting this vital resource has become a key component of IT policy administration. Ensim Unify allows senior IT policy makers to insulate AD from potentially disastrous changes by delegating access for specific tasks to the appropriate people. This allows:

• Granular role-based delegated administration
• Creation of customizable provisioning and de-provisioning policies
• Security Group management
• OU management at appropriate levels
• Reporting management for security audit

These are the user provisioning and access control capabilities that keep Active Directory safe, and at the same time increase end user productivity.

With Unify Active Directory Manager, you can reduce the number of privileged accounts and you can prevent unauthorized changes—both of which can lead to configuration mistakes that result in costly downtime.

• Increase security – Easily create administrative roles with permissions to perform a defined set of tasks in a web-based console—mistakes using native tools are eliminated
• Maximize productivity – Quickly create persistent provisioning and de-provisioning policies that can be safely and securely delegated to appropriate levels below senior IT
• Simplify compliance and internal security auditing – Every action is automatically logged to provide a transparent audit trail

Hardware

Intel Pentium 4 processor (1 GHz or faster) with the following:

• 512 MB (or higher) RAM
• At least 20 GB of hard disk space (unless otherwise specified)

Software

• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 operating system (Standard or Enterprise edition). It is recommended that the operating system be freshly installed using default settings.
• Microsoft Exchange 2003 Systems Management Tools Service Pack 2 (SP2) (for Exchange 2003 management)

or

• Microsoft Exchange 2007 Systems Management Tools (32-Bit) (for Exchange 2007 management)
• The following Microsoft Windows components (installed and enabled):
• IIS
• .NET 2.0 framework
• ASP.NET
• SMTP
• NNTP

Support Applications

• MS Exchange 2003 / 2007
• SharePoint Services 3.0
• BlackBerry Enterprise Server

Support Devices

• Windows Mobile
• Blackberry
• iPhone with ActiveSync