Active Administrator allows you as an admin to actually efficiently manage Active Directory Security and Group Policies. It saves you tons of time. Active Administrator is many tools in one, for less money than the competition. Check out the features below and you'll become a believer in about 5 minutes.
You can download an evaluation copy from here :
Now that you've got Active Directory in place, have you discovered that right away there would be replication problems managing policies in your Active Directory Domain?
You need a solution to help you track them down. We searched and found that Active Administrator did this perfectly. A simple click on the Group Policy Object (GPO) and you can see the settings with ease.
Report on Active Directory and Group Policy Objects
Active Administrator incorporates a full suite of reports that allow you to efficiently manage your Active Directory enabled environment. You can report on security, object classes, Group Policy settings, Group Policy affected registry keys and more.
Resultant Set of Policies (RSoP)
With Active Administrator, you can achieve in seconds what would normally take hours. View the resultant set of group policies that apply to a specific user on a specific computer. Report on the list of group policies that apply, or get a detailed report of the exact policies that apply. Full capabilities for "what-if" scenarios like "What if a user moves to another OU?" or "What if the computer moves to a new site?".
Copy Group Policy objects between domains
With Active Administrator, you can seamlessly copy Group Policy objects between domains and migrate the Security Group Filters and Group Policy Links on them. This makes it easy to configure Group Policy objects in a production environment that are identical to a test environment or to deploy a Group Policy object to a remote site that would have otherwise been impossible.
Backup and restore Group Policy objects
The Backup\Restore function allows you to backup and restore Group Policy objects for modular deployment, archival purposes, or simply fault tolerance. This includes the backing up of the GPO's security filters and group policy links.
Report on Delegation of Control
After using the "Delegation of Control Wizard" in Active Directory, you may find it difficult (if not impossible) to report on the permissions that the wizard modified. Active Administrator makes this problem disappear with its Delegated Permissions Report. It filters out default permissions to leave you with a summary report of all delegated permissions down the tree.
Modify security on Active Directory objects
It is now easier and quicker than ever to properly set permissions on objects in Active Directory.
Search for permissions on Active Directory objects
I f you want to know where the "Help desk" group has the "Reset password" right in your domain, this can be a daunting task manually. With Active Administrator, you can search for permissions in Active Directory across your entire domain in one easy step.
Easily manage Group Policy links
Active Administrator includes a simple method for the addition, deletion and viewing of Group Policy object links across domains in your Active Directory enabled environment.
Reports from Active Administrator
Active Administrator provides several reports that can be tailored to exacting specifications. These include:
If Double-Take had been installed on the source server it would have replicated all file changes (as they
occurred) to a target server in another building. This would mean that the target server would have
a second by second up-to-date copy of what was on the source machine.
Failover
The target server also hosts the failover module and continually monitors the source server. In the event
of a server failure the target server could automatically assume the names and IP addresses of the failed
server (in addition to its original name), it would also invoke scripts to restart applications. Users would be
back on line in seconds or minutes with little or no data loss.
Double-Take configurations
Double-Take can be used in one-to-one mode as above or one-to-many, or many-to-one, chained or with
two servers each acting as source and target for the other. In the example above the target server would
have taken over as "source" server BUT could still be acting as "target" server for other source servers
in a many-to-one configuration.
Double-Take augments your existing tape back-up strategy
Double-Take can be used with your existing tape back-up system. The advantages are that if the tape
system backed up the target server it could back up files that were locked open on the source server.
This means that your source server need never be shut down to back up these files. Also if you were in
a many-to-one configuration, you could do all back-ups from the single target server thus simplifying
management and improving the performance of back-ups.
Setting up Double-Take
You choose the files, directories and server volumes to be replicated. A simple to use client system then copies this replication set to the targeted server (this mirroring operation can be done whilst both servers are active). These operations are both automatic and transparent. After that the replication, monitoring and failover functions are automatic.
Platforms
Multi-platform consistency provides identical functionality on NT/W2000/W2003. Cross platform management provides an integrated control point for all Double-Take machines. The Double-Take Management Console and Text clients displays a comprehensive picture of allNT/W2000/W2003 Double-Take machines on your network.
Resource Utilisation Features
Network - Double-Take provides features to minimise network resource utilisation and provides options that allow network administrators to optimise bandwidth usage.
Asynch. Operation - Loosely coupled communication allows Double-Take to operate asynchronously enabling source machines to continue processing even when the network link is congested. By contrast, in synchronous systems, WAN connection bottlenecks can severely impair the performance of source machines.
File Updates - The system only transmits changes made to files, not whole disk blocks or whole files. This dramatically reduces the amount of bandwidth required and means that Double-Take runs efficiently even over low bandwidth links.
