Active Directory-Pros & Cons

[Cathy Wilbur]

We are moving to Active Directory very soon. Was wondering if anyone out there had any problems moving to this from Novel and what you encountered.

We do quite a bit of FTP processing to and from OneWorld for our interfaces.

We require our output queues in Createform to be referenced by IP Address and not by name.

If you have Active Directory do you still install your own software on your PC or does the Active Directory Group need to do it for you.

Did you have any issues with your Java development products with Active Directory?

Rolling out changes with OneWorld - was that an issue with Active Directory.

Any problems you encountered and possible work around would be very helpful.

 

[Sebastian Sajaroff]

Hi,

In fact, I never had any OneWorld-specific problems related to A/D; you shouldn't worry about that.

Unless you plan to deploy SSO, OneWorld interacts
very little with A/D other than Windows domain
accounts used to launch JDE services on Windows boxes.

 

[Cathy Wilbur]

In our company they are going live with active directory for the developers and everyone else in company. But we can no longer do the following on our PC's

1) Will no longer be able to install any software on our PC because we will no longer have any administrative permissions to do so.

2) Can no longer create any new directories on our C drive - they must be defined for us.

3) Cannot use Remote desktop anymore - going to something else. They do not want to use static IP addresses any more. We now have to key in the long 16 character PC name each time we remote in.

Looking at creating a virtual machine so we can now do some of our development work. We have some development software that helps us do our work. Was wondering if anyone else out there has AD and how they installed it and how the developers deal with these issues.

Do any of you see any issues about this. As developers we are not very happy about the decision because we will not be able to do our work as we have before. Feel free to give me your input - as Developers we are trying to explain to these people doing the AD (Active Directory) installation why we still require these rights.

How is your company using Active Directory and what rights do your developers have in installing software?

Can your developers create directories on their "C" drives?

What is everyone out there using in place of Remote Desktop.

Know this is not about just One World. This effects all of us here as One World developers and Java developers. We also do lots of SQL queries to troubleshoot and for testing. We now have to prove we need each piece of software to get it reinstalled back on our PC. We have to teach the onsite area how to install the software on our development PC that we require. Each of us as developers may have specialty software they are using.

What they plan to do is install a new hard drive on our PC's with a basic ghosted machine with no developer software. We will have the other hard drive still there just so we can copy all our files over to new machine. But we will need to have onsite help us move our files because we will have no authority to create directories to move files over. Once we get everything there then we need to get all that developer software reinstalled one PC at a time. They should be ghosting these machines with most of the developer software already installed.

 

[Larry_Jones]

Cathy,

its not Active Directory imposing the restrictions. Its the Policies implemented through A/D. A/D does not automatically prevent you from creating folders, installing software, etc. Someone in your organization is.

At my company Developers have local admin privileges and can do what they need on their PCs. We also use VMWare - I have multiple VMs on my PC - My JDE Development box is a VM.

Remote Desktop is still an option but we are encouraged to use a better tool called TeamViewer.

Used to be when I had to rebuild my dev machine it was a multi-day grind to install the particular software I need to support the various applications I'm responsible for. Creating VMs that are portable from box to box has greatly reduced that process.

You have my sympathies on your situation. Sounds like the IT bureaucracy in your company has fully matured. This is why I'm so glad I work in a relatively small company.