USER AND DIRECTORY MANAGEMENT TOOLS
NetIQ's Directory and Resource Administrator (DRA) captured nearly 25 percent of the vote to win the category Best User and Directory Management Tools.
DRA lets you easily and securely delegate administration tasks to your help desk and to other users in your organization. DRA provides an easy-to-use interface designed to ensure enterprise security, significantly reduce the overall cost of administration, and increase administration efficiency in your Windows environment.
DRA allows for easy, Web-based self-administration with the DRA Web Console. This product streamlines IT tasks and reduces errors by automating complex, time-consuming administrative processes and providing trusted delegation. Data integrity is maintained with DRA, which reliably enforces corporate business polices by controlling what data can be put into your directories.
PRINT MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE
In the category Best Print Management Software, NORTHERN's PrintControl won one of four Readers' Choice Awards.
PrintControl can reclaim your printing resources, create accurate reports, and control the costs involved. With PrintControl, a system administrator can set quotas on users, groups, and printers, as well as filter which documents can be printed. You can configure PrintControl to trigger a number of actions when a user or group reaches their printing quotas, or at any number of customizable thresholds. An action can send a popup message to the user about their quota status, deliver a popup to the system administrator bringing attention to a locked quota, or take a printer off-line for maintenance.
PrintControl's ODBC-compliant database logs all printing jobs within the network, allowing easy exports for cost analysis and forecasting reports, as well as offering internal billing flexibility. Its chargeback functionality holds users accountable for print costs. Organizations can set up a cost-per-page structure, which will calculate the printing costs after each print job and designate which user or department is responsible for this cost.
CAPACITY PLANNING AND TREND ANALYSIS SOFTWARE
For the best in capacity planning and trend analysis software, our readers chose Argent Software's The Argent Predictor.
The Argent Predictor is a leading capacity planning and trend analysis product because it enables users to monitor, track, and graph all metrics regardless of their source. Users can concur- rently graph on a single chart all their hubs and routers, SQL Server statistics, and CPU performance on a number of different servers.
The product provides full SQL Server backend and Crystal Reports interface, and it installs in under 60 seconds. Because of its agent-optional architecture, The Argent Predictor does not need to have agents installed on monitored servers.