New ActiveRoles Server Release…

Although the paradigm of enterprise IT and security have changed significantly over the years – one thing is true – the foundation of your identity, security and access control strategy MUST be secure, stable and well maintained.

Our flagship product – a leader in the marketplace with over 60 Million seats sold over the years – has experienced some dramatic change over the years – and 2012 is no exception!

Although the role of the AD Administrator has gotten more complex, strategic and challenging over the years – one thing has always been there to help – Quest One ActiveRoles Server. For years, we have helped administrators secure AD, delegate security permissions on a very granular basis – far more than native or competitive tools enable.

On top of that – we have been monitoring our customers on several specific issues associated to AD – and delivered to them a suite of tools to help manage it:

- AD Group bloat and under-utilization

Many customers indicate that the explosion of groups within their environments continue unabated. It is not unheard of for a customer to tell me they have a 10-30:1 of groups to users

- Unable to keep up with day-day AD management tasks

Instead of always being fire drills, we’ve implemented a rapid to use, simple to deploy scheduled workflow infrastructure that allows you to search for information within AD or ARS datasets, perform an action and receive notification – all on a scheduled basis. True to ARS form, this functionality of course is delegatable to other AD admins and can be set to run as them, yours, or ARS Service account to manage its security scope.

- Fully customizable, fixed function AD Group management system. Much like Quick Connect last year, we’ve decided to split off the End-User functionality of ARS to a more robust and specific platform – Quest One Identity Manager – Active Directory Edition

This change in market approach enables us to:
- Provide a fixed-function, market specific AD Group Management Service – with a very rich and powerful workflow system
- Enable customers to completely manage and customize the User Interface that is delivered to their end-users – something that is usually as important as the technology itself.
- Enable an ability to scale to 100’s of thousands of end users using standard infrastructure such as IIS and MS-SQL – OOTB
- Deliver to the auditors a fully functional, usable (and most importantly!) ad-hoc reporting and dashboard service so they can manage and monitor group recertifications/attestations – without asking IT for a report/excel/txtfile/export, etc.
- Enable line of business or resource owners to manage their OWN resource recertifications (if wanted) without having to use IT for engineering
  - We find many customers has distinct and separate lines of business with differing security and audit policies – we enable this self-control and management out of the box!

In addition to managing AD, we have taken a few different approaches to enabling our customers to work better and more efficiently. In 2011 we separated our builtin data synchronization tool from the ARS product line to give it more focus, more development resources and ultimately – more flexibility for our customers. Quick Connect is going to expand rapidly this year past its current (and rich) connector set to do more in the cloud, more for ERP and more for webservices. Stay tuned here on that one – we’ve just finished the roadmaps and I am very excited!

Of course, no new release nowadays would be complete without Windows 2012 Server support – and I am happy to report that we support Windows 2012 Server for operations of the service itself, Exchange 2012 and MS-SQL Server 2012!

Some other highlights from the release:

Automated workflow – Automates manual tasks to reduce errors and speed AD management
Simplified clean-up – Simplifies clean-up of AD objects to prepare environment for Windows 2012 and/or cloud integration
Interface “look and feel” – Makes working with ARS more intuitive
Enhanced Exchange management support – More completely manages your Exchange environment
Notification enhancements – Customizes notifications with more data and status information
Approval enhancements – Enables delegation, escalations and re-assignments of admin requests
Scanning & pruning – Makes it easier to manage Active Directory Group and object bloat
Native integration – Integrates with Quest One Identity Manager, Quest One Quick Connect, Office 365, Lync, Quest Authentication Services and Quest Defender