Quest Helps Manage Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS)

Quest is the first vendor to offer solutions to help manage Microsoft's Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS). AD LDSis a light-weight directory service that is used to support significant directory-enabled applications, extranet deployments and e-commerce, while providing autonomy from the corporate Active Directory  (AD).  As more organizations are deploying line-of-business applications that depend on AD, the momentum and adoption of AD LDS is increasing as well.  As a leader in Active Directory management, Quest can facilitate and extend management capabilities to AD LDS in the following ways.

Quest Commercial Products that extend capabilities to AD LDS

Recovery Manager for Active Directory is the only product that allows for recovery of Active Directory, AD LDS, and Group Policy in minutes. In enterprise-scale network environments, it offers a comprehensive, easy-to-implement, easy-to-use, wizard-based solution, including:

• Online, selective restoration of Active Directory, AD  LDSand Group Policy data
• Fast, remotely managed recovery of Active Directory, AD LDS and Group Policy
• Centralized, remote creation and management of System State backups
• Active Directory, AD LDS or Group Policy comparison reporting and troubleshooting

ActiveRoles Server is a product that enables organizations to improve the security and manageability of their AD LDS deployments. This is an enterprise class product that can be licensed to manage AD LDS alone, Active Directory alone or both AD LDS and Active Directory together. ActiveRoles Server provides a complete Microsoft directory service management solution for the entire enterprise.

Key Capabilities include:

• Automated provisioning – providing the ability to automatically add and remove users from groups that are granted application access on AD LDS
• Administrative Delegation – ability to granularly delegate administrative access to objects and containers in AD LDS
• Multiple Interfaces – provide multiple familiar interfaces that provide many more options for performing AD LDS tasks than what is provided natively
• Custom Views – ability to configure custom collections of AD LDS (and Active Directory) objects for task simplification purposes or to apply business rules and policies

* Microsoft renamed Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM) to Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS)

Freeware Management Packs

Quest Management Pack for Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS)  extends Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 and Operations Manager (OpsMgr) 2007 to provide proactive performance monitoring and real-time diagnostics for detecting, troubleshooting and rapid resolution of replication, performance, and availability problems in AD LDS environments. The Management Pack for AD LDS provides a graphical topology view of AD LDS, and numerous rules to monitor the health of AD LDS instances and the systems that host them.  With the Management Pack, administrators can quickly identify the root-cause of problems in AD LDS, and promptly resolve them.