You know what: Microsoft became miserably incompetent in IT. I develop open-source code. But that never made me one of the “I hate proprietary software or IT giant corporations” types. …
So yesbut… there are still no good alternatives to Active Directory in the context of managing IT for an organization with 10,000+ users, thousands of endpoints, and millions of files which need to maintain proper association with individual user accounts and be delivered to specific endpoints on demand.
Google Workspace is the most feature-rich competitor, but it is a pale shadow of the level of IT infrastructure that Microsoft’s ecosystem provides.
For Microsoft to fade away, someone needs to build a competing large-scale IT management system that provides the same kind of functionality that Active Directory does.
AD managed with PowerShell is the bomb. As sole IT person, I deployed it at a company with only 35 users, made my life so easy. I had scripts that would handle 90% of the on and offboarding work, even outside the MS environment.
Next company used Google for auth and it was a damned nightmare to manage user on and off boarding. We had zero device management of any sort.
Yeah, I think people who have never used AD don’t really understand - there is no equivalent for a busy sysadmin. There’s no open source alternative that has the same functionality - I’ve looked. You might be able to cobble together a similar level of capability with 5 or 6 different applications, but good luck getting them to all play nice with each other and remain stable enough for an organization with hundreds of users.
I’ve also looked at jumpcloud and a few other IDPs with device management too. But okta is such a pain and expensive. They’ve tried to burn me on their other products
So yes but… there are still no good alternatives to Active Directory in the context of managing IT for an organization with 10,000+ users, thousands of endpoints, and millions of files which need to maintain proper association with individual user accounts and be delivered to specific endpoints on demand.
Google Workspace is the most feature-rich competitor, but it is a pale shadow of the level of IT infrastructure that Microsoft’s ecosystem provides.
For Microsoft to fade away, someone needs to build a competing large-scale IT management system that provides the same kind of functionality that Active Directory does.
AD managed with PowerShell is the bomb. As sole IT person, I deployed it at a company with only 35 users, made my life so easy. I had scripts that would handle 90% of the on and offboarding work, even outside the MS environment.
Next company used Google for auth and it was a damned nightmare to manage user on and off boarding. We had zero device management of any sort.
Yeah, I think people who have never used AD don’t really understand - there is no equivalent for a busy sysadmin. There’s no open source alternative that has the same functionality - I’ve looked. You might be able to cobble together a similar level of capability with 5 or 6 different applications, but good luck getting them to all play nice with each other and remain stable enough for an organization with hundreds of users.
Nah. Anything but AD is a clusterfuck.
Okta. We’re looking at replacing AD with it.
I’ve also looked at jumpcloud and a few other IDPs with device management too. But okta is such a pain and expensive. They’ve tried to burn me on their other products
Ah, but OKTA only provides authentication?
How does that replace the infrastructure management?
I must have missed the point where Okta has a joinable directory service with an extendable schema and GPO like functionality too.