News

Quest, Azaleos, Zenprise Unveil Updated Products at TechEd

• By Ed Scannell and Stuart Johnston
• June 12, 2006

Quest will bolster its position in the Windows-based management space on Monday, rolling out its Management Console for Active Directory, along with newly minted versions of its products for tracking user activities and change control, group policy management and password management.

“What we are trying to offer is a wider range of products to help organizations ensure better management of Active Directory, so we have now tied some best-of-breed products together in a single interface based on the familiar Microsoft Management Console . . . [which] provides a single view of Quest products and native Active Directory management tools,” said Jackson Shaw, senior director of product management at Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based Quest.

Complementing the new management console, Quest debuted four improved Active Directory products. The first, Version 2.5 of Quest inTrust for Active Directory, offers automated tracking of all changes to Active Directory and Group Policy settings. The product is available immediately as a Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) pack, and the company says it will serve to enhance the monitoring abilities of MOM. Quest also rolled out Version 7.5 of its Recovery Manager for Active Directory which is designed to enable more frequent backups thereby ensuring that recent data is always available for recovery.

Additionally, the new Quest Group Policy Manager allows administrators to schedule Group Policy object updates at the most convenient times and enforce a multi-level approval process. The fourth new offering, the Password Reset Manager lets users reset passwords in a more secure fashion. Version 4.0o also allows for greater customization of password policies thereby allowing administrators to define different password policies by organizational units or group membership.

The Management Console is available now free of charge. Quest inTrust is also available now with pricing starting at $12 per enabled user account. The Recovery Manager costs $10 per enabled user account and will be available sometime this week, the Group Policy Manager goes for $8 per enabled user account and will be available next week, and the Password Reset Manager is priced at $7 per enabled user account and is set to ship early next month.

Azaleos of Redmond, Wash., is demoing its new BladeMail turnkey e-mail appliance. Currently in beta test and set to ship in the third quarter of 2006 for Exchange 2003, BladeMail runs on IBM BladeCenter hardware and diskless blades supported by an IBM System Storage N3700 fabric-attached storage system, according to a company statement.

The company expects to be able to support up to 17,500 Exchange 2003 e-mail users on a single BladeCenter chassis, and up to 70,000 Exchange 2007 e-mail users per BladeCenter when Exchange 2007 becomes available. BladeMail for Exchange 2007 will ship at the same time as Exchange 2007, Azaleos’ statement said.

Zenprise of Fremont, Calif. announced it will encode content from leading technology publisher Digital Press in upcoming versions of its Microsoft Exchange Symptom Database, “a knowledge store of all known Microsoft Exchange symptoms and solutions.”

Customers will get an abbreviated abstract of the problem and solution from Zenprise, and can purchase the Digital Press publication for a more in depth discussion of the issue, the company said. The Symptom Database already includes knowledge from the Microsoft KnowledgeBase and from leading Exchange architects and MVPs.