[Musket]

I completely agree, but what can you do? I'm guessing - because I'm a newbie - but I'm guessing that virtually every office in the US is built on Active Directory. Is there even anything else that comes close to AD?

But I'm like you. If I were an island I would've dumped this crap long ago.

[zeugma]

Is there even anything else that comes close to AD?

NIS and LDAP both do pretty much the same thing as far as authentication goes. The biggest problem with AD is that it only talks to other microsoft products, and not even all that well with anything but the latest versions of that. People end up completely tied to the microsoft way of life. I don't live on an island, but I find that I have extraordinarily little need for anything microsoft makes.

[MarkL]

I completely agree, but what can you do? I'm guessing - because I'm a newbie - but I'm guessing that virtually every office in the US is built on Active Directory. Is there even anything else that comes close to AD?

Iagine everything that MS promises with AD, but with about a 6 year technological lead. That's eDirectory from Novell. It scales far better than AD (it's been tested in a tree of over 2 BILLION objects!), it's a lot more resiliant to problems, less traffic in synchronization, and it will run on UNIX, Linux, Win2K Server (and I belive 2003, but they still may be working on that), as well as Novell servers.

The one thing that Novell has is terrific technology. They one thing they don't have is any sort of decent marketing capabilities. The marketing guys in Provo couldn't figre out how to market ice water in the Sahara!

Mark

[myself6]

Novell NDS blows Active Directory away.

The netware operating system is OPTIONAL now. :) They are doing some really cool things with Linux now.

NDS has been around longer than AD and is FAR more mature.