Single Label Active Directory configuration

Its recently come to light that many of the new Microsoft products will not support configuration in a Single Label Active Directory (SLD), this configuration is where Active Directory domains and DNS name is simply named ‘Customer’ rather than ‘Customer.Com’ or ‘Customer.local’ - this is a fairly common practice for older Active directory implementations where the AD design may not have followed best practise.

  

The following products don’t work well/at all with an SLD

·         Microsoft Lync server, does not support SLD’s http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2379369/en-us

·         Microsoft Exchange 2010, supports currently but does not like SLD’s http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2269838/en-us

Renaming the SLD to a proper namespace will not work, Migration solutions like the ones from Quest Software are the only valid way to migrate a non conformant SLD domain into one that will be supported with modern Microsoft server products http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300684/en-us, as many Microsoft server products will not function after a domain name change to fix the above problem.  

At the current time there is no solution to this issue other than to use a Migration solution such as Quest Migration Manager for Active Directory.

With the release of Windows 2008 R2, Microsoft have prevented the creation of Single label Directories which will help in the future http://technet.microsoft.com/de-de/library/ee681710(WS.10).aspx.

Email archiving, E-discovery and poor business practise

Just been reading this blogpost about a disgruntled customer of Mimosa's email archiving platform: http://blog.foreignkid.net/2009/11/mimosa-systems-nearpoint-horrible-company-and-relationship-stay-away/ , a very interesting read and it may be one sided but it does go to show how management of a situation could have led to a much better situation for Mimosa. When customer expectations are not being met, a company has a couple of options;

1. 'The customer has signed an agreement to purchase our software, they are cancelling the project so we will keep their money'.... shortsighted and greedy
2. 'Its the software that has caused this issue and over a protracted time period we can clearly see the solution doesn't work so lets agree to a settlement that will work for both of us' ..... This is the solution that should be taken by responsible software vendors.

It is fact that a software product will not always work correctly in a given situation, but as responsible businesses that hope to have other opportunities to work with the same or similar customers we shouldn't burn our bridges.


Disclaimer: the author works for Quest Software, who has an email archiving platform.