My company is going through the ?should we convert our network from NetWare NDS to Microsoft AD? phase, and I?m looking for a little professional direction. I’ve tried the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” approach, but it’s fallen on deaf ears.
Background: We?re a fairly large company with 30 sites scattered throughout the country and thousands of users. Each site has a local administrator with administrative rights to his or her OU and their own servers. We have only a couple of admins with root access at the main company site. We pretty much stay out of each others way, and unless someone has a problem, we hardly need to communicate. To put it another way, the network works.
My main concern is my users. Unlike many administrators I?ve met, I tend to put users at the top of my priority list, with ease of administration coming in a close second (no one here, of course). They are the reason I have a job, and the respect I give them (and the respect I get in return) makes working here enjoyable. The last thing I need is to make their lives harder.
At this point in my career, I?m indifferent to change, as it always presents an opportunity to learn new things. I?m a Novell CNE dating back to NetWare 4.0 and have worked with NDS exclusively through version 6.5, albeit with different companies. The recent announcement that we would be doing a feasibility study of converting our NDS environment to an AD environment came as a surprise (I can hear the screams now), but I figure it was only a matter of time before I had to deal with this. Since I?ve never really dealt with Active Directory, it would be difficult for me to hold an intelligent conversation on the matter. So I?m looking for some direction from those who have worked with both. I?m not looking for Microsoft bashers to take another whack at them, I?m looking for real life experiences from those who have struggled or triumphed through a similar process. If you converted, how did it go? Would you do it again? From an administration standpoint, what are the advantages or drawbacks of AD vs NDS? Have there been any recent unbiased studies done on both? (I?ve done the Google search, but most have been commissioned by one or the other).
So, let the OS games begin.