File System Factory for AD 3
Event-driven, policy-based storage management software automates user and group home folder creation, a variety of on-going maintenance tasks, and data disposition options saving hundreds of hours annually in manually-administered storage tasks.
Second generation Cross-Empire Data Migration add-on enables migration of Novell network user and group data to associated folders on a Microsoft network while maintaining trustee assignments and other metadata or allowing you to change these settings before during the migration.
The Need for Automated Network User Storage Management
Network administrators spend countless hours each year performing network user storage tasks. When you consider everything from the creation of network user home folders and team storage areas, to the everyday management tasks associated with maintaining these folders, and ultimately to the cleanup and disposal of these network folders—and then realize that most of this work is done manually—you start to get an idea of what user and group storage management could be costing you.
But what if you could automate your user and group storage management so that network home folders and group storage areas were created and even provisioned with documents when needed? Additionally, what if this automation extended to storage movement, redistribution, and cleanup of specified file types?
Instead of dealing with “orphaned home folders” taking up space on your primary storage, what if you could assure that user home folders were being deleted or vaulted to a secondary storage device once a user was deleted from Active Directory?
And what if you could assure that industry and corporate compliance regulations for data access, security, and retention were being strictly enforced and could prove it if needed?
Introducing File System Factory for Active Directory
File System Factory for Active Directory automates the full lifecycle management of user and group network storage. Leveraging Microsoft Active Directory, File System Factory for AD automates a comprehensive set of storage management tasks based on events, identities and event-driven policies that you define. In the process File System Factory for AD can save you significant time and money, while assuring industry and corporate compliance.
Identity-driven Policies
File System Factory lets you create policies that trigger actions once events have taken place in Active Directory. For example, creating a new user triggers an action to create the new user’s home folder according to the size, quota, and rights settings specified in the policy. Moving a user from one organizational unit in Active Directory to another triggers the migration of the user’s home folder from one policy-specified server to another. Removing a user from Active Directory can trigger any number of policy-specified actions from deleting the user home folder immediately, to delaying it for a set amount of days, to vaulting the storage to a secondary storage location.
File System Factory for AD lets you create policies for user home folders, collaborative storage areas for a group, and more. Home folder policies can be accessed through profile paths and Remote Desktop Services.
On-going Storage Maintenance
Powerful optimization, analytical, and reporting technologies in File System Factory for AD provide a variety of automatic and administrator-initiated storage maintenance features. These include:
- Grooming home and collaborative storage areas of unallowable file types
- Generating a variety of storage reports
- Determining file types being stored
- Determining rights to storage content and how the rights were attained
- Renaming a user home folder when a user has been renamed in Active Directory
- Redistributing user home folder and collaborative storage across servers based on amount of content stored
- Load balancing the distribution of new home folders and collaborative storage areas across servers
- Assigning people to be quota managers that can grant additional storage quota when needed
Data Disposition Options
It’s all too common for a former employee’s home folder to be taking up valuable storage disk space for months or even years after the employee has left an organization. These folders are often referred to as “orphaned folders” because they don’t belong to a “parent” in Active Directory. One of the most powerful features of File System Factory is the flexible home folder disposal options it offers when a user leaves an organization. These include:
- Making a removed user inactive while removing access rights and moving storage content to secondary storage
- Deleting a user home folder immediately when the user is removed from Active Directory
- Vaulting the contents of a user home folder to secondary storage immediately or after a set number of days
- Removing certain file types from the user home folder before vaulting the remaining user home folder content
Compliance
Storage compliance regulations typically focus on three areas: retention, security, and integrity. File System Factory for AD policies let you specify where user and collaborative storage content is retained, prevents others from unauthorized access, and ensures that data is not lost when a user leaves an organization. If called upon to prove this compliance in an audit, File System Factory for AD provides the reporting tools to do so quickly and demonstrably.
Substantial Return on Investment
With event-driven policies continually automating the creation, on-going management, and disposal of user home folders, File System Factory for AD can save a substantial amount of money over time. Today, the Condrey Corporation technology built into File System Factory for AD is managing millions of users in hundreds of organizations worldwide, and in the process, saving each organization both money and time over doing these management actions manually.
Cross-Empire Data Migration
This add-on subsystem to File System Factory for AD lets you quickly and easily perform automated movement of data from a Novell file system source, to a Microsoft file system target. Cross-Empire Data Migration supports a variety of scenarios, including the movement of data for multiple users and groups directly to its intended location across multiple servers or shares in a single operation—all while preserving certain file system metadata. Further, Cross-Empire Data Migration lets you leverage the policies provided in File System Factory for AD to allow the customer to move to a managed storage environment on the target system and optionally restructure and reorganize data in the process.
Click here for more information on Cross-Empire Data Migration.
Microsoft Windows Requirements
The File System Factory for AD engine can be hosted on a Microsoft Windows Server 2008 SP2, R2 or later with an x86 or x64 processor. The management software can be run from a Windows workstation running Windows 7, Vista, XP, 2000, or a Windows Server 2008, or 2003.
File System Factory for AD’s unique approach to enabling automated lifecycle management of user home folders and collaborative storage areas through identities, roles, and Active Directory event-driven policies introduces an extensive set of features and benefits unavailable in other products or custom-developed scripts.
Features
- Event-driven automation of storage tasks
- Policies that you define
- Creates and provisions home folders when users are created
- Creates collaborative storage folders
- Creates auxiliary storage folders
- Supports Windows profile paths
- Supports Windows Remote Desktop access
- Manages user and collaborative storage quotas
- Links renamed users with user and collaborative storage folders
- Sets access rights according to policy
- Updates access rights when a user’s role changes
- Migrates storage transparently
- Redistributes user and collaborative storage
- Gathers data and assembles reports
- Grooms storage to remove unallowable file types
- Disables user storage access for inactive users
- Deletes or vaults home folders when users are deleted
- Migrates user and group data from a Novell file system platform to a Microsoft Windows file system platform (via separately-purchased add-on)
Benefits
- Lowers costs by automating tasks that are normally done manually.
- Flexibility to define where user home folders and collaborative storage folders are created, what documents are provisioned within these folders, what rights are established to these folders, when and where to vault a removed user’s home folder, and more.
- Creates home folders and even populates them with documents according to the role of the user.
- Members of cross-functional teams can be granted personal folders within a collaborative storage area for sharing documents within the group. Teachers can set up virtual classrooms for distributing and handing in homework.
- Provides the ability to create additional storage area for a user, such as an associated user folder for the HR department.
- Policies ensure that users are given only the access and access rights to the storage they need.
- Establishes limits on user and collaborative storage disk space. If more space is needed, a designated quota manager can provide storage in set intervals.
- When a user is moved from one container to another, the old policy is rescinded and the new one is invoked—automatically, based on the move event.
- Moving storage from one device to another is as simple as changing a policy path and then initiating the management action.
- When storage capacity is getting low on one server, storage content can be moved automatically to another server.
- Provides quickly accessible data on storage content, policies, rights, and more.
- Removes non-work related files from user home folders and collaborative storage areas. For example: personal music, photography, and movie files.
- Through Inactive Users policy, removes access and even migrates home folders of inactive users to secondary storage
- After a user is deleted, disk space on primary storage is freed up by deleting or vaulting the contents of the user home folder to secondary storage
- Helps enforce compliance by enforcing data access and data retention
- Disk storage recycling helps implement a “green” data center approach by automatically recycling disk space
- Greatly simplifies the steps involved in migrating user and group home folders from a Novell source to a Microsoft Server target through an easy-to-use wizard interface. The Cross-Empire Data Migration add-on provides advanced capabilities for converting Novell file system rights and trustee assignments to Windows file system rights and permissions before you migrate.
Cross-Empire Data Migration
Cross-Empire Data Migration is a subsystem within File System Factory for AD that allows for the movement of file system data between storage infrastructures on different platforms governed by different identity and security frameworks. Many customer initiatives can precipitate the need for such a move, including a migration to a different server operating system, a merger and acquisition by the organization, or just the consolidation of environments.
The mission of Cross-Empire Data Migration is to quickly and easily perform automated movement of data, based on a variety of scenarios, including the movement of data for multiple users and groups directly to its intended location across multiple servers or shares in a single operation, all while preserving certain file system metadata. Further, Cross-Empire Data Migration lets you leverage the policies provided in File System Factory for AD to allow the customer to move to a managed storage environment on the target system and optionally restructure and reorganize data in the process.
Identity Mapping
File System Factory for Active Directory 3 provides advanced capabilities for converting Novell file system rights and trustee assignments to Windows file system rights and permissions before you migrate. You begin by creating an identity map for associating Novell user and group file system rights and permissions with user and groups in the Microsoft network where you will be migrating.
With the introduction of File System Factory 3.0.2, Cross Empire Data Migration provides you the ability to specify Novell rights and trustee assignments to Windows NTFS rights and permissions—including Special Permissions by first proposing the NTFS permissions and rights that will replace the Novell trustee assignments. Then it lets you modify theses proposed permissions to the rights, permissions, and Special Permissions you desire.
Novell file ownership and security settings are set to Microsoft NTFS rights and permissions through the Identity Map interface.
Wizard Interface
Once the identity mapping is complete, data migration conducted through a wizard launched from FSFAdmin. You can implement a phased approach to the migration by incorporating one or more migration types offered and then inject work onto the File System Factory for AD event queue. In taking advantage of the dispatching and state machine architecture features of the event queue, the migration effort can be enhanced both in terms of performance through the FSF Agent subsystem and in terms of reliability in overcoming outages and other factors that occur in real-world environments.
The Cross-Empire Data Migration architecture is engineered to eventually support multiple types of source platforms and targets, but the current release is limited to a Novell eDirectory source environment and a Microsoft Active Directory target environment.
Cross-Empire Data Migration supports the following data movement options:
- User to user
- Folder to user
- Group to group
- Folder to group
- Folder to folder
Q: What are the tasks that File System Factory for AD automates?
A: Through Active Directory identity-based policies, File System Factory automates the following:
Provisioning:
- Home folders
- Profile paths
- Remote Desktop Services home folders
- Remote Desktop Services profile paths
- User auxiliary home folders
- Collaborative home folders
On-Going Management
- Security analysis
- Quota management
- Storage relocation
- Storage load balancing
- Storage redistribution
- Content analysis
- Storage reporting
- File grooming
Disposal
- Immediate or deferred home folder deletion
- Home folder vaulting
- Filtered file removal prior to vaulting
Q: How can File System Factory help address my organization’s mandates for compliance to industry and government regulations?
A: File System Factory enables you to you can demonstrate regulatory compliance for data retention, security, and access.
First, you can specify, within the Active Directory identity-based policies themselves, where user and collaborative storage will reside. This could be on shares or servers where sensitive corporate data is not stored.
Additionally, File System Factory lets you set and then the product enforces file system rights when the user home folder and collaborative storage folders are created. Full Control is not a default right that File System Factory for AD grants to the user and thus, prevents potential security threats. If users have been previously been given Full Control, or any other right you wish to revoke, you can simply perform a Manage Operation in File System Factory to enforce all users into compliance with the rights as indicated in the policy.
Finally, File System Factory lets you indicate when and where to vault the user home folders when users leave the organization. With this knowledge, you can easily retrieve and restore this data when needed.
Q: How does File System Factory for AD manage collaborative storage?
A: First of all, let’s define what we mean by “collaborative storage.” Collaborative storage is a shared storage area where a group of people in an organization can collaborate by sharing files. For example, a cross-functional project team in an organization might need a collaborative storage area where all members could access and submit project files.
File System Factory for AD lets you easily create collaborative storage areas through collaborative storage policies that you can assign to Group objects or to an organizational unit (also known as a container). You can structure the collaborative storage in one of two ways:
- Creating a single project folder where all project members have access and have the same rights.
- Creating a project folder with a specified owner. The project folder has subfolders for each of the members of the group. This configuration is done through a process called “Dynamic Template Processing.”
File System Factory for AD works with Active Directory to ensure that only members of the Group object have access to collaborative storage. As new members are added to the group, they are automatically granted access to the collaborative storage. As members are removed, they are denied access, but the files that they submitted to the collaborative storage folder remain.
Q: What is new in File System Factory for AD 3.0.2?
A: The most notable product enhancement from Version 3.0.1 to 3.0.2 is the more advanced Cross-Empire Data Migration add-on. The new version of Cross-Empire Data Migration is better at maintaining the Novell trustee assignments and converting them to NTFS permissions during the migration. It also lets you change permissions before you migrate.
Q: Why is the Cross-Empire Data Migration functionality sold as a separate add-on to File System Factory for AD?
A: The Cross-Empire Data Migration subsystem is intended for those customers that are undergoing a migration project from one platform to another. We recognize that this feature is not needed by all customers, so we have decided to only make this feature available to those customers that actually need it.
Q: Is File System Factory for AD available only through direct purchase through Condrey Corporation?
A: No. The product may be purchased and delivered through one of many Condrey Corporation partners and resellers. A list of Condrey Corporation partners and resellers is available here.
Q: What are the steps in upgrading from Version 3.0 to 3.0.2?
A: You will need to install the updated .MSI files for the FSF Engine, Event Monitors, FSF Agents, and for FSFAdmin. Since you are upgrading, rather than installing the new components, the process is very streamlined. Unless you have purchased the Cross-Empire Data Migration add-on, there is no need to update the license file.
Q: I have File System Factory for AD 2.5. What is the process for upgrading to Version 3.0.2?
A: The upgrade process involves using the Migration utility to migrate any of your existing File System Factory for AD 2.5 policies as well as deferred delete pending events. A migration can be either “in-place” or an “across-the-wire.” You can do an in-place migration when the server currently hosting the File System Factory for AD 2.5 FSF Engine will be the same server that hosts the Version 3.0.2 FSF Engine. You do an across-the-wire migration when the Version 3.0.2 FSF Engine will be hosted on a different server than the one currently hosting the File System Factory for AD 2.5 FSF Engine.
The migration is a three-step process:
- The Migration utility exports policies and deferred delete content from the File System Factory for AD 2.5 FSF Engine.
- The FSFAdmin Setup Wizard imports the policies and deferred delete content to the File System Factory 3.0.2 FSF Engine.
- You perform Manage Operations to rebuild the File System Factory catalog.
For more information, see Chapter 3 in the File System Factory for AD 3.0.2 Installation Guide.
Q: Does the Active Directory schema have to be extended to support File System Factory for AD 3.0.2?
A: To enable collaborative storage or auxiliary storage management, you must extend the Active Directory schema to enable File System Factory for AD attributes. If you do not intend to have File System Factory for AD manage collaborative storage or auxiliary storage, there is no need to extend the Active Directory schema.
Note: You extend the Active Directory schema using SchemaTool.exe
File System Factory for Active Directory is licensed according to the number of users managed by the product. Condrey Corporation offers two purchase options: Subscription and Licensing + Maintenance.
Subscription
Subscription means that the File System Factory for AD software is enabled for one year and includes software maintenance, upgrade protection, and support. Near the end of the subscription cycle, you are notified of the need to renew the subscription in order to continue to use File system Factory for AD. Unless the subscription is renewed, File System Factory for AD will be disabled 13 months after the date that the subscription began.
License + Maintenance
License + Maintenance is File System Factory for AD licenses purchased and owned by the purchasing organization. Maintenance, upgrade protection, and support are included during the first 12 months following the purchase of the licenses. To continue maintenance, upgrade protection, and support after the first 12 months, you must purchase a yearly contract.
Price Quotes and Pricing
For more information click here.
Reseller
We have relationships in place with a number of resellers worldwide and welcome additional relationships. If you are a reseller interested in selling File System Factory for AD click here .
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 fsf_3_0_2_install_guide.pdf |
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| fsf_3_0_2_admin_guide.pdf |
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| FSF_3_0_2 for AD Academic Flyer.pdf |
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| FSF_3_0_2 for AD General Flyer.pdf |
879KB |
| FSF for AD 3.0.2 Business White Paper.pdf |
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| Danville School District #118 | 252 KB |
| Clinton Prairie School Corp. and Concord Community Schools | 206 KB |
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File System Factory for Active Directory 3
For a 30 Day Evaluation, you may click on the File System Factory License link below to obtain a license now.
Registered users may also download the lastest version below. The same software distribution is used by both registered users and evaluation users. The difference is that as a registered user, you possess a non-expiring license key.
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 FSF_3_0_3.iso (MD5 Checksum) |
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