Editor's Best

SharePoint
You've most likely heard the business catchphrase "location, location, location" more than a few times. In today's interconnected world, a more appropriate business term might be collaboration, collaboration, collaboration, which technology has made possible no matter your location. Businesses have discovered the value of Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration platform for sharing information with internal users and are now looking to extend that capability to people outside the corporate network. Partners, vendors, clients, and service providers can all benefit from easy information access, but opening up SharePoint sites to external entities can create a tremendous burden for the IT pros tasked with managing and securing these SharePoint sites and their users. SharePoint Solutions' Extranet Collaboration Manager (ExCM) for SharePoint 2007, my Editor's Best selection for the SharePoint space, can help lighten this burden for SharePoint administrators. ExCM is a SharePoint add-on that provides provisioning, security, and monitoring functionality to extranet sites. It also takes advantage of SharePoint's form-based authentication (FBA), which simplifies the user logon experience and provides a wide range of options for storing extranet user data separately from your internal user accounts.

To get a customer's perspective on this solution, I talked with Dave Chan, senior systems administrator for Draftfcb, a large advertising agency with headquarters in Chicago and New York City. He said, "We chose SharePoint Solutions' ExCM because we needed a way to manage external users (e.g., clients, vendors) accessing our SharePoint sites. There are several ways to manage those users out-of-the-box: either by creating Active Directory accounts, creating a separate AD farm for external users, or using a straightforward FBA model, but those options wouldn't have solved the system administrators' major problem of user management." He said that the one feature that stands out for him is the invitation option. This option lets delegated administrators (which can be established per site collection) invite new users and takes user management away from the systems administrators and assigns it to the site collection owners. After thorough internal testing of ExCM, David believes it will fully meet his company's needs.
—Gayle Rodcay

Systems Management
Peace of mind is something IT pros want but don't often have—there's always something, somewhere, that can and will go wrong with your system. In the huge number of systems management products that come across my desk, I've seen many solutions that deal with Active Directory (AD), Group Policy, identity and access management, and Help desk management. But for sheer peace of mind, one solution stands out: NetPro's ChangeAuditor, a real-time auditing and reporting solution that details changes to AD, file servers, and Microsoft Exchange.

As Senior Windows Administrator, Microsoft MVP, and Windows IT PRO contributor Eric Rux says, "I've written about file security and how to set it up. But what about after the fact—one year after you set up your new file structure, is it still in good shape? Have the users been following the rules? I inherited my current AD, so sometimes I wonder what the previous admin did before he left. I would use this product to put my mind at ease."

Charles Campbell, manager of end-user computing at a US port authority that oversees a seaport and several airports, echoes Eric when he says, "It's great peace of mind." Charles says his biggest challenge is keeping disparate systems up and running. "We've got so many systems based on so many OSs. We have everything from desktops and servers to access control for doors and cameras and parking systems." Before ChangeAuditor, Charles used GFI LANguard security tools. The reason he chose ChangeAuditor was that the interface seemed easy to use and was simple but powerful. ChangeAuditor did a lot more than previous tools and included AD monitoring.

"It's lived up to our expectations," Charles says. "One thing it's done is allow us to give more access rights to lowerlevel staff. This frees up our higher-level staff to do value-added tasks." ChangeAuditor keeps all information in a database, and you can run reports on what people are doing, including all users, groups, and passwords added. Charles says, "It gives our system administrators metrics."

Charles likes ChangeAuditor's instant alerting function, which proved itself by catching some consultants who were doing their job. "We had security guys come in to do testing. They tried elevating privileges using a hack and we caught them. Stopped them in five minutes."

Would Charles recommend ChangeAuditor? He says, "Anyone who has AD in their shop should seriously look at this product. It pays for itself. It's made our system the best it could be."
—Caroline Marwitz