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Microsoft's Most Valuable Asset

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Re: Microsoft's Most Valuable Asset

#11

Post by jtchang »

This guy is spot on. I've done quite a bit of time in the corporate environment running middleware systems such as LDAP and AD.

Google Apps does not have a viable solution because it is not in house. There is no easy way to extend the schema and integrating with Google Apps is actually quite difficult. There are tools to help you integrate from Active Directory to Google Apps but not the other way around.

Also Active Directory is actually pretty awesome from a management standpoint. Suppose today you wanted to have 50k linux boxes with all the same logins. You would probably use LDAP (which is essentially AD under the hood). But how about automatic package management per user? How do you configure that? AD has all this built in and more.

Re: Microsoft's Most Valuable Asset

#12

Post by ghshephard »

jewel wrote: post #7

In 2006 I helped put in an OpenLDAP server in a medium-sized company (150 users). Once we'd gotten past the initial hump of configuring everything to work with it, it was really nice to have single sign-on and a list of users and permissions accessible from any computer on the network. Since we could access the directory from perl it was easy to make a simple UI for the support team to make changes. Maybe I'm missing…

The OP is bang on - I started work at Netscape in 1996, went over to Oblix in 1999 (A pure play LDAP management company) and then spent the next 2-3 years in a startup (Loudcloud) in which we tried to run our entire infrastructure off of Netscape Directory Server (Still, one of the finest engineered products I ever worked with - only had issues when you ran out of disk space).

Eventually, after I started managing IT, with all of the Windows Systems, and Exchange Servers, and Users - AD just infected us, and it's really hard to get out of your life. For a while, it was Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES), but being able to control whether people can login to their laptop/desktop/VPN/Email/etc... through AD is just so much easier when you have a lot of windows systems. Also - Group Polices, ACLs on things like Printers, File Systems, and other Resources - and now with Lync starting to pop up....

If you can live without Microsoft Exchange, and you don't have a lot of windows laptops, you can probably avoid it - but, AD really is the competitive weapon that Microsoft continues to be able to wield to keep themselves in the heart of a lot of IT environments.

Would love to go run an environment/company that had a pure-play LDAP server like OpenLDAP, Netscape/Fedora/389 Directory server, or, OpenDS.

Re: Microsoft's Most Valuable Asset

#13

Post by joenathan »

In the corporate space I'd agree, but the Xbox brand isn't to be discounted. The Halo series is a money printing machine.

"All in all, the Halo franchise has made nearly $3 billion from sales."

"Halo: Reach, Halo creator Bungie's last Halo game, made more than $200 million in sales in the US and Europe in the first 24 hours of release. This figure eclipsed all previous 2010 US entertainment launches, including the three-day opening weekends of Iron Man 2, Alice in Wonderland and Toy Story 3."

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-10-31-more-than-46-mi...

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/12/us-microsoft-halo-...

Re: Microsoft's Most Valuable Asset

#14

Post by bad_user »

rizzom5000 wrote: post #10

While I've certainly seen firsthand the importance of AD in enterprise, and I agree that it will continue to sell a lot of Server and SharePoint licenses for MS - I think Office is probably a stronger most valuable asset for a variety of reasons. Among them, Office actually is MSFT's most profitable product and it actually currently doesn't face any noteworthy competition (not that AD does, mind you). Also, I had to…

Office has strong competition. I've seen businesses switch to LibreOffice under the threat of BSA. And Google Apps is just awesome ... being an online service it doesn't have all the features of Office, but it's within reach 24/7 on whatever device, wherever you are, the only requirement being an Internet connection.

Being able to make changes to a document (collaboratively too) from an iPad or an Android device, while commuting, is the definition of awesomeness.

Re: Microsoft's Most Valuable Asset

#15

Post by Cogito »

My dayjob is as a business process consultant, specialising in the Atlassian application stack among other things.

Almost every single hour of my time working with an enterprise customer involves dealing with AD or related Microsoft products in some fashion.

In the enterprise, I almost always deploy to windows products, over the preferred linux+postgres+apache stack, because the business has already invested in resources to manage Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, and IIS, in conjunction with AD. Configuration tends to be more platform agnostic, as the applications are Java based, however the number of gotchas that seem to crop up around the Microsoft products make it a big enough pain.

It's unfortunate that the link to AD so often blossoms out to the entire infrastructure stack, as the products are in many ways inferior to their open source relatives, but the momentum, support and resources are already there and it doesn't look like changing anytime soon.

Re: Microsoft's Most Valuable Asset

#16

Post by sliverstorm »

rizzom5000 wrote: post #10

While I've certainly seen firsthand the importance of AD in enterprise, and I agree that it will continue to sell a lot of Server and SharePoint licenses for MS - I think Office is probably a stronger most valuable asset for a variety of reasons. Among them, Office actually is MSFT's most profitable product and it actually currently doesn't face any noteworthy competition (not that AD does, mind you). Also, I had to…

AD is probably much more entrenched though. Office is a tool; AD is an infrastructure.

Re: Microsoft's Most Valuable Asset

#17

Post by contextfree »

bad_user wrote: post #14
rizzom5000 wrote: post #10

While I've certainly seen firsthand the importance of AD in enterprise, and I agree that it will continue to sell a lot of Server and SharePoint licenses for MS - I think Office is probably a stronger most valuable asset for a variety of reasons. Among them, Office actually is MSFT's most profitable product and it actually currently doesn't face any noteworthy competition (not that AD does, mind you). Also, I had to…

Office has strong competition. I've seen businesses switch to LibreOffice under the threat of BSA. And Google Apps is just awesome ... being an online service it doesn't have all the features of Office, but it's within reach 24/7 on whatever device, wherever you are, the only requirement being an Internet connection. Being able to make changes to a document (collaboratively too) from an iPad or an Android device, whi…

Beyond Google Apps, Office faces major "competition" just from less of what people do with computers being about Office-like documents and more about less formally structured web activity.

Re: Microsoft's Most Valuable Asset

#20

Post by irq »

jtchang wrote: post #11

This guy is spot on. I've done quite a bit of time in the corporate environment running middleware systems such as LDAP and AD. Google Apps does not have a viable solution because it is not in house. There is no easy way to extend the schema and integrating with Google Apps is actually quite difficult. There are tools to help you integrate from Active Directory to Google Apps but not the other way around. Also Active…

> LDAP (which is essentially AD under the hood)

This is false. LDAP itself is nothing more than a protocol (that's what the P stands for). There are very popular implementations of this protocol (OpenLDAP being just one) but even they are not "AD under the hood".

AD = LDAP + Kerberos + Microsoft proprietary extensions

So if anything, under the hood of AD you will find LDAP, but not the other way around.

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