Mission Critical Software Inc. has added a set of tools to its OnePoint EA suite that can automate the migration from Novell’s NetWare to Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000.
The OnePoint Domain Administrator 5.0 can automatically populate both the Windows NT and Exchange directories with the contents of the NetWare bindery and NDS directories, and it preserves advanced NetWare directory attributes such as Security Equivalence, according to Kent Erickson, director of product management for Mission Critical in Houston, Tex.
It streamlines the move to Active Directory, he explained, by allowing administrators to manage the resulting Windows NT and Exchange directories as one entity.
Jamie Lewis, president of the Burton Group in Midvale, Utah, said that if a company has chosen to move from NetWare to NT or Windows 2000, this is a tool that would be extremely useful.
“Now I don’t think that all NetWare customers out there are going to drop everything they’re doing and run in droves to Windows 2000, by any means,” he explained. “But there are customers who are planning to do that.”
Mission Critical’s Erickson said that as a Windows NT systems management vendor, Mission Critical often gets asked for help with NetWare-to-NT migration.
“These are typically customers who have acquired somebody who’s got some Novell, or they’ve taken a new company under a corporate IT wing, and they want to just consolidate,” he said.
What they want to do is protect their investments in their current data, Erickson explained.
“Those are the things we do — move over the directory data, file data and file security permissions,” he said. “So we support NetWare 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0, and both the NDS and the bindery.”
To ensure full security translation during the migration process, OnePoint Domain Administrator 5.0 automatically generates Windows NT security groups based on NDS Organizational Units (OUs) and retains file permissions associated with the NDS OUs. It also provides built-in active scripting capabilities for developing custom COM-enabled scripts that can be executed for each migrated user account OU or group.
For flexibility during migration, the tool allows administrators to selectively and incrementally copy files to Windows NT or Windows 2000. It also provides full preservation of security settings including “security equal to” values that have no equivalent in Windows NT or 2000. It can migrate NetWare volumes larger than 4GB, and it is a snap-in for the Microsoft Management Console (MMC).
Burton Group’s Lewis compared Mission Critical’s migration products — the OnePoint EA suite in general — to others that have been developed for migration to Windows 2000, including that of Entevo Corp.
“Entevo doesn’t have some of the Exchange management functions that Mission Critical has,” he said. “But Entevo has more of an integrated architecture that uses an underlying store, which is an advantage for them.”
It uses the underlying Active Directory store rather than creating its own interim database, he explained.
OnePoint Domain Administrator 5.0 is available immediately as part of the OnePoint EA suite. It is an integrated suite of products aimed at simplifying and unifying directory, security and operations management in Windows NT-based networks and Internet data centres, as well as helping enterprises prepare for migration to Windows 2000. The suite consists of: Directory Administrator, Resource Administrator, Domain Administrator, Exchange Administrator and Event Manager.
The OnePoint EA suite (www.missioncritical.com/product/default.htm) pricing starts at US$27 per managed user account.
Mission Critical Software Inc. in Houston, Tex., is at 1-800-814-9130.
