Windows IT Pro Community Forum, July 2012

Transend Documentation

In regard to Russell Smith’s review of Transend Migrator, Transend does provide white papers that are scenario-specific and that address the various steps of migrating between specific systems. Now, we obviously can’t cover each and every scenario. But we do offer instruction for the most common scenarios, for both single-user migrations and batch migrations. And we even provide a more detailed Technical Reference Guide for the more popular migration scenarios as well. You can find scenario-specific white papers on the Transend website.
—Josh Krefetz for Transend

Although there are scenario-based whitepapers and Help files, as I mentioned in the original review, I do feel that they’re not particularly well written. Also, still missing in action is a whitepaper for migrating to Office 365, which is likely to be a scenario many customers will be interested in. Overall, I still feel that the documentation for Transend Migrator could be improved.
—Russell Smith

LDAP Over SSL

I really enjoy reading Windows IT Pro, and I was particularly looking forward to Jan De Clercq’s article Use LDAP Over SSL to Lock Down Active Directory Traffic because we want to use this feature in our environment. However, I found that the article was short on explaining how non-Windows clients (e.g., Mac, Linux) will integrate with this solution if they are to use LDAP over SSL (LDAPS). I understand that Windows IT Pro is focused on Windows, but a reference about how other OSs integrate with Microsoft solutions would have been helpful. Mixed environments are often a necessity these days. Also, regarding the use of LDAPS on Windows clients: Aren't those clients supposed to have a copy of the certificate used to encrypt the traffic? I didn't see anything mentioned in the article about how the clients are supposed to use SSL for encryption. Can you clarify?
—Ricardo Coto Oviedo

Thank you for the positive feedback! The article is indeed focused on how to set up LDAPS from Windows clients to securely connect to Active Directory (AD). In the future, we will consider an article that highlights the non-Windows client particularities for setting up LDAPS against AD. However, the principles for setting it up remain the same for both Windows and non-Windows clients. Regarding the operation of LDAPS, clients just need to “trust” the certificate issuer of the server’s LDAPs certificate—which means that the certificate issuer should be a trusted certificate authority (CA) in the client’s certificate store. For the rest, everything—including server authentication and the exchange of the encryption key—occurs automatically as part of the SSL exchanges between client and server. And you must also remember that the use of a client-side certificate isn’t required; it’s an option. Hope this helps.!
—Jan De Clercq

Microsoft and the Dumbening of Technology

I appreciate the humor of Paul Thurrott’s article Microsoft and the Dumbening of Technology. I’m sure there are still a few assembler programmers from the 1970s who are laughing out loud. (All those IBM machine language programmers from the 1950s are dead and gone by now!) In some sense, every generation of technology is easier to use than the last. As technology advances, it becomes more accessible to more people with less technical knowledge. This is the natural order of things—to make the tools simpler and more accessible to more people.—C. Marc Wagner