Heh - funny I received the half off email at the widget company I'm at earlier this week.
Thanks, Brian Desmond [EMAIL PROTECTED] c - 312.731.3132 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of joe Sent: Saturday, December 09, 2006 6:10 PM To: ActiveDir@mail.activedir.org Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] Quest Recovery Manager Yep, when I was at one large widget company we would really be interested in some product from a given company but the per user or per object licensing costs were so insanely out of the park for an infrastructure type product versus the money available for infrastructure that we could never buy the products... Then every December the main sales guy, we will call him Art to protect the guilty, would come along and take folks out to lunch or dinner or whatever and say it is all half off or more so buy now... Unfortunately, in this company I was in, it was pretty much impossible to purchase anything after Thanksgiving due to the complexity of the buying system and the number of folks who had to sign off on things and the amount of vacation time being taken by people. If it wasn't at a price that was expensable on corporate credit card, it wasn't getting bought at the end of the year. So half off, three quarter off, heck even pennies on the dollar likely wouldn't reduce the pricing enough although everyone wanted it. Silly thing is if the company would simply go to a site based licensing scheme and put a good price on it they would have been selling products to the company 6 years ago and not going through the same dance every year. -- O'Reilly Active Directory Third Edition - http://www.joeware.net/win/ad3e.htm ________________________________ From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Darren Mar-Elia Sent: Wednesday, December 06, 2006 7:18 PM To: ActiveDir@mail.activedir.org Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] Quest Recovery Manager "The Quest guys told me the other day they had a lot of leeway on some pricing for one of my clients so I'm wondering if this is the end of the year for the salesmen and they need to make their year this month (if so this is an excellent time to buy Quest software)" Ha! Show me a sales person from ANY software company who doesn't get that wide-eyed, crazed, foaming-at-the-mouth look in his or her eye around quarter-end or year-end and I'll show you a sales person that is about to be fired. Its part of the game. Gotta make quota, esp. at year end, and to do that, you gotta discount! I would think most IT shops are wise to it by now. Its kind of a sick dance we all do J Darren From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Brian Desmond Sent: Wednesday, December 06, 2006 1:54 PM To: ActiveDir@mail.activedir.org Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] Quest Recovery Manager Yeah. Sit down with your team and figure out what it is you need - must have, would like to have, and nice to have. Then, tell all the vendors you want a little webinar (they love these), and then compare your notes after each/all of them again. Rule out any ones now that don't do the trick Then go get ready to have it shoved way up your ass when they give you the pricing. Then you can suggest (if they haven't already) that they come discuss it in further and plan on a lunch/dinner or two on their dime while you further discuss how expensive their stuff is and what they can do for you to make it more attractive. The Quest guys told me the other day they had a lot of leeway on some pricing for one of my clients so I'm wondering if this is the end of the year for the salesmen and they need to make their year this month (if so this is an excellent time to buy Quest software). Now that said, I've worked in a few large shops, and we haven't had any of this frilly fancy shit. It's expensive, I hate the per head/per seat/per whatever pricing, and frankly all I think it does is idiot proof what's already there. Rather than having something do it for you, why don't you learn how it does it, because then you'll be smarter, and you can go get a new better job with your new found talents. That said there is some cool shit from quest and NetIQ and those guys - I'm into the change control/management stuff in shops where there are too many cooks in the kitchen. Quest's migration stuff is of course great if you can afford it. Thanks, Brian Desmond [EMAIL PROTECTED] c - 312.731.3132 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Myrick, Todd (NIH/CC/DCRI) [E] Sent: Wednesday, December 06, 2006 3:23 PM To: ActiveDir@mail.activedir.org Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] Quest Recovery Manager I don't think there are many independent rankings out there. You have to figure that Windows ITPro and SearchWindows are probably the easiest sources to get access to online, but they are influenced by ad dollars sometimes. It is possible that Burton Group and possibly Gartner have done some research.... But I doubt it. I know that directions on Microsoft hasn't covered it. It is a pretty niche topic. I think the best way to approach this is to have a good old fashion bake off of the technologies. Depending how big a player you are, you can probably get Quest, Netpro, Veritas, and Commvalt to step-up. I would say that all the technologies are pretty stable at the moment; there isn't a lot of innovation going on anymore, so it is pretty hard to make a mistake choosing one of these products. Todd ________________________________ From: Tim Onsomu [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, December 06, 2006 2:06 PM To: ActiveDir@mail.activedir.org; ActiveDir@mail.activedir.org Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] Quest Recovery Manager Does anybody know what independent rankings look like for AD DR tools? -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of Gil Kirkpatrick Sent: Wed 12/6/2006 9:59 AM To: ActiveDir@mail.activedir.org Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] Quest Recovery Manager <shamelss plug> NetPro has an AD data recovery product called RestoreADmin that competes very well with the Quest product. It's solves the AD object recovery problem nicely. See http://www.netpro.com/products/restoreadmin/index.cfm. </shameless plug> -gil -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, December 06, 2006 7:37 AM To: ActiveDir@mail.activedir.org Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] Quest Recovery Manager Todd, thanks for your insight. Good points to think about. James Masters Systems Architecture and Engineering The Kroger Co. Office: (859) 363-2346 Cell: (859) 653-8644 -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Myrick, Todd (NIH/CC/DCRI) [E] Sent: Wednesday, December 06, 2006 9:14 AM To: ActiveDir@mail.activedir.org Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] Quest Recovery Manager Same here... Good stuff. To be fair though, most of the major AD players have these tools now. The thing about the Quest (Aelita) tool was its use of their own APIs to address issues like Domain Local Groups etc. I haven't kept up with the latest versions so I am not sure what direction they have gone since 2003. Latest information I remember was they offered you the option to use the MS API methods for recovery, or their special brew for more advanced recovery options. Now if put some extra effort into your query, you might get this thread nice and hot, and generate input from people like Stuart Kwan discussing supportability issues using the various recovery methods, Guido & Vladimir discussing in great depth the inherent problems of group recovery, various opinions on how to use isolates sites with rubber chickens, MIIS, ADAM to reanimate deleted objects (This seems to be a favorite topic of Gil's to use to fill in spots at DEC)... did I forget anyone... hmm maybe Robbie might take time away from work on his fields medal or latest cookbook to write you a Monad shell script that Joe will find a way to compile into a .exe to execute from a ADFIND query pipe. In all seriousness though, when evaluating DR feature for AD you will have a lot of things to consider, technologies being just one. The nature of the type of AD objects you want to recover and in what state should be considered (Groups, GPO's, etc, attribute data). How much time you want to dedicate to this operation? How much you want to spend? And who will support you if the recovery operations fail or seem to cause more problems. If you are looking just to recover deleted users, the various free tools out there will do just fine. I highly recommend that you start your DR project today by just using the good'old MS backup utility at a minimum to make a MST formatted backup of the system state and data from a domain controller in each of your domains you think has the most current AD data in your organization. That pretty much guarantees you can recover every object given that you have the data in some backup. And to all the people I mentioned above. Happy Holidays... and New Year. Todd -----Original Message----- From: Day, James (NPS) Sent: Wednesday, December 06, 2006 8:03 AM To: ActiveDir@mail.activedir.org Cc: ActiveDir@mail.activedir.org; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [ActiveDir] Quest Recovery Manager Hi James We bought this when it was an Aelita tool and loved the product - it pretty much paid for itself in one step the second month we were using it. The product is still good but I have nothing good to say about Quest support (but I could complain for hours about it if I am allowed to). There are a couple of other similar ones that may also be worth. Regards; James R. Day Active Directory Core Team Office of the Chief Information Officer National Park Service 202-354-1464 202-230-2983 (CEL) [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] ger.com Sent by: To [EMAIL PROTECTED] ActiveDir@mail.activedir.org ail.activedir.org cc Subject 12/05/2006 05:11 [ActiveDir] Quest Recovery Manager PM EST Please respond to [EMAIL PROTECTED] tivedir.org Does anybody have anything particularly good or bad to say about Quest's Recovery Manager product? We are evaluating it for an 2 forests, and 3 domains. As always, thanks for all of your insight and expertise. -James List info : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir@mail.activedir.org/ List info : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir@mail.activedir.org/ List info : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir@mail.activedir.org/ List info : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir@mail.activedir.org/ List info : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir@mail.activedir.org/
