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Edirectory versus Active Directory

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by gov-doctor

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My company is divided between Edirectoy versus Active Directory. We are not a large shop with about 1300 users. Very little in terms of extranet applications and such. I am looking for articles or papers done by someone other then Novell and Microsoft to point us in the right direction.

We currently have Both Novell 5 and Windows NT 4 tied by NDS for NT. The current Novell is not working proberly for my remote sites. If they loose the link they can no longer log in, or access resources. The Novell side of the house says the upgrade to E-directory will solve all of our problems, but present no evidence to support this.

Please I need help from someone that has already been in this situation.

Thank you

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by tom_sawyer70

gov-doctor...
I would suggest "googling" on those terms and see what you get.

IMO, what I have found is that those who know eDirectory, love eDirectory. Those who know AD, love AD. Those who know both, love eDirectory...unless they're consultants that have a financial interest in more hardware, more admins, etc.

That being said, your question is broad and difficult to answer without knowing more. If you use Exchange 2000, then you need AD. If you have Linux, Solaris, Netware, NT and W2k, you would probably want eDirectory.

The major technical benefits of eDirectory are:
- it is the most widely deployed DS on the market (i.e., established track record and evolution)
- it runs on multiple platforms (which is nice unless you're resigned to a Windows-only environment...including internal re-orgs, mergers, or acquisitions)
- it replicates faster and does not require huge amounts of bandwidth (AD replicates all object attributes everywhere, eDir replicates component pieces).
- AD is a feature of an OS, eDirectory is a separate product that runs on multiple platforms to manage resources.
- Hardware, admin costs and the immaturity of AD have made it a bear to implement (you'll see this in your search).

Other instances reflect the maturity issue...you don't have to reboot a Netware server to run a repair, whereas you have to down a Windows box to repair the AD. If you still have NT4 domains, you have to run AD in "mixed mode" and will not be able to take adv. of all the features.

This is a good article...although it's a little dated, AD has not had a major upgrade since it was published.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,67249,00.asp

Dave

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