We recently held an essay contest inviting Micro Focus employees and customers to describe why they love using Micro Focus products. We wanted to know how our users were using Micro Focus products to make their lives—and the lives of their users—easier. Entries were sorted into solution groups and judged by the appropriate Solution Marketer.

This entry was selected as the second-place winner in the Identity and Access Management solution group. The author, Paul Pedron, received the second-place prize of a $200 Amazon Gift card as well as a free, Micro Focus community t-shirt.

Take a look at the winning entry below.

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By: Paul Pedron

Certified in MSCE, I was teaching at a local college that had the Windows MCSE certification track taught in the evenings for 4 months.

The Active Directory administration portion alone was 18 days. Administrators learned Rights/Permissions, Security Groups, OU's, Inheritance, Trees, Forests, DHCP, DNS, FISMO roles, consoles, mapping, login scripts and snapins; all those things wrapped up in this 18 day training.

The last part of the Active Directory course had 3 days of free time to expose the students to whatever technology we wanted before the next part of the MCSE track started. I used this opportunity to expose the untainted young admin minds to other products with similar (or better) capabilities.

I chose to show them NetIQ eDirectory, because in my experience it is easier to manage and takes less time and resources. The students also had a understanding of the terminology, so this new product should be easy for them to compare.

We propped up an OES server with the same resources as the Windows server used in the MCSE training. I had the students install eDirectory with the similar roles, along with User, Groups and OU creation the first day. I had them run some exercises installing the Novell Client on the workstations then ran drills on Home directories, Mapping, login scripts, Rights/Permissions and inheritance on volumes using iManager.

After day two the questions and comments started coming in...
That was easy, is that it?
Inheritance is simple...
A single web console can manage these roles?
No additional snapins to load?

After day three and more exercises with managing DNS, DHCP, Volumes and tree administration, more questions were coming in.
We only need one server for all these roles?
Why doesn't Microsoft make it this easy?
Why doesn't everyone use eDirectory?

In my view the 3 day exposure was a success and they now understood about problem/resolution. Looking at your own environment and exploring different vendors to determine the best solution to resolve issues.