I was talking to a sys admin over lunch the other day about Active Directory (AD) products, and Imanami’s group lifecycle management solution came up. His comment: “Now that’s a niche product!” He then spent our lunch break illustrating why he needed such a product by telling about the pain he's having managing the many groups mushrooming in his organization’s AD forest.
As it so happens, Imanami announced this week that it's collected its group management tools into one solution, GroupID 5, available this fall. Currently the tools are offered a la carte, and according to CEO and CTO Robert Haaverson, will continue to be available in both suite and a la carte options.
Imanami’s GroupID offers automation, self-service, and synchronization features to enable management of groups from creation to expiration (and beyond). As companies grow, merge, or split off, they realize the need to better manage groups in AD. According to Edward Killeen, Imanami’s director of sales and marketing, one sector that’s showing increasing interest in Imanami’s group lifecycle management solution is the financial industry. (Perhaps not so coincidentally, that's the very industry my sys admin lunch partner works in.)
GroupID synchronizes groups to maintain accuracy, provides reporting functions about groups and the overall health of AD, and offers a self-service portal for end users. Group owners can be notified via email about expiring groups and can access a Web-based interface that shows their groups. A click in a checkbox allows group owners to expire or keep groups. “Our customers are most appreciative of the fact that expired groups aren’t deleted,” says Killeen. Group ID also supports Windows PowerShell scripting. Pricing for GroupID runs $5 to $20 per seat. For more information, visit http://imanami.com