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Javelina Releases Active Directory Toolset

Javelina Software, a four-year-old company with a background in Banyan Vines, launched a toolset for Active Directory administrators on Tuesday at the MCP TechMentor conference in San Diego.

• By Scott Bekker
• 09/03/2002

Eleven tools make up ADvantage, which is designed to help administrators perform repetitive or menial Active Directory tasks quickly and in bulk without scripting.

The tools launch in Javelina's own interface, as opposed to within an MMC snap-in to the Active Directory. ADvantage then calls Active Directory in the background to carry out an administrator's commands.

Tools in the kit include: Add Users, Analyze Access Control Lists (ACLs) in Active Directory, Analyze ACLs on Files and Shares, Delete Users, Modify Users, Reports on User Data, Reset Passwords, Resynch Active Directory, Search and Replace on Active Directory user attributes, Search and Replace on ACLs in Active Directory, and Search and Replace ACLs on Files and Shares.

The most popular elements in the toolkit among about 20 companies beta testing the product have been the capability to make changes to multiple users at once, get reports on users and the wizard-driven ability to create and distribute custom tools, says Elena Kennedy, Javelina's marketing manager.

The search and replace functionality is a major improvement over the user-by-user approach to making changes in Windows 2000 Active Directory, unless an administrator wants to do scripting. "It allows you to use search and replace to find all users with a certain area code, for example, and replace it with a new one," Kennedy says. "It helps me as an administrator where I might have had this enormous list of tasks that by themselves don't take up that much time, but added together can take up an entire day."

Usefulness of the tool begins to become apparent with organizations of at least 100 users, according to Javelina. As for an upper limit of scalability, Kennedy says one of the product's beta testers is using the search and replace functionality on an Active Directory with 100,000 users.

ADvantage is licensed on a per administrator basis. A license costs $495 per admin copy until Jan. 1, when Javelina plans to raise the cost to $995 per admin copy. It is distributed only via downloads from Javelina's Web site (www.javelinasoftware.com). A 30-day evaluation edition is also available.