Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Apple Corporate, Enterprise, OS, Apple
The strange tale of Active Directory support in OS X
Applepeels is always an interesting read. If you aren't familiar with that blog, it is written by a former Apple employee who was fairly high up on the org chart, so he brings an interesting perspective to all things Apple. His latest post covers two things that are of interest to me: working with Steve Jobs, and Apple in the enterprise.
I find it shocking (though not that shocking after using Apple's tool) that they didn't consider Active Directory integration as a top priority for OS X. OS X has come a long way in this regard, but here's hoping it is even easier in Leopard.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Sham The Sam said 1:19PM on 8-21-2006
prospective, eh?
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Justin said 1:26PM on 8-21-2006
TL;DR
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Scott McNulty said 1:48PM on 8-21-2006
Ahh, I fixed it. Thanks!
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michel said 2:05PM on 8-21-2006
...
it cannot be a "top priority"
even ibm, sun, novell or redhat made that a "top priority"
because AD is a total controlled microsoft format (forget the fact AD can be connected with an ldap client, you cannot access all properties and functionalities that way)
of course theses products (os x, linux, solaris stuff) can , somehow, to be members of an AD realms. but there are no point for these enterprise to try to follow microsoft in that : they cannot.
they all tries to offers BETTER solutions less expensive to lure people out of Active Directory. and THAT is their top priority.
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BAM said 3:47PM on 8-21-2006
This blog is so apple like from my inside knowledge... and so depressive too.
So so much in the bank, I wonder why Apple simply did not buy Thursby and included Dave / AdmnitMac in the OS.
Apple SMB implementation is so pour, it's a shame. And seing 10.4 being worse than 10.3 in many accounts did not help...
:(
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Pete White said 5:07PM on 8-21-2006
Better AD support would be nice but i dont think its essential, we have some macs at work in the design studio and they sit pretty happily on their own. They have access to Exchange which is far more important through Entourage and file sharing isn't too much of an issue (though could be improved). From an administration point of view its not too bad with the macs being seperate, in a way its good. There are tons of issues Windows related with AD that bringing macs in too would most likely complicate the troubleshooting processs even more.
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Jake Summers said 1:53PM on 9-11-2006
The reality is that even Leopard does not really improve the AD integration experience which is really about authentication. The only vendor that got it right in terms of AD integration with non-MSFT platforms is actually an ISV -- Centrify (http://www.centrify.com). As it relates to Mac OS X, Centrify actually delivers not only the authentication piece but also delivers Group Policies specific to the Mac OS X environment, ie it delivers full AD integration (authentication *and* policy).
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Brady J. Frey said 11:52AM on 8-22-2006
http://www.centrify.com/ does a good job with AD on a mac from what I've seen, but we're running OD on our 3 xservers... however, that's not to say OD doesn't have some serious crap bugs in it... I can pinpoint 2 long weekend nights this year alone required rebuilding a server because of OD corruption. Most of these issues have been curtailed when we moved to webmin and stopped using the server manager after lots of DNS corruption. I blame their OS for so many 'hooks' into the files, forcing us to lock those files out of their control.
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