DM/Suite - 15 May 1999

Let's face it: Administration features in Windows NT are, to coin a term, somewhat enterprise-challenged. (Many of you might place a stronger condemnation here!) FastLane Technologies' DM/Suite rescues beleaguered administrators who manage NT-based WANs. Fastlane's offering was previously available as a set of individual products with different names (Virtual Administrator, the Phoenix Domain Reconfiguration Tool, and several custom adaptations of the FINAL scripting product). FastLane upgraded and renamed many of these products and their ancillary utilities. The company now bundles the products into a comprehensive enterprise management suite. DM/Suite (DM stands for directory management) comes with several invaluable tools for NT network administrators:

DM/Suite's key benefits are twofold: It improves enterprise administration in an NT 4.0 environment (or mixed environments), and it streamlines the migration to Windows 2000 (Win2K). Using DM/Administrator will later ease the transition process to a hierarchical directory management paradigm. Although it won't provide all of AD's features, it will provide suite functionality later that will let you transfer your FastLane-created organization directly into AD. In addition, using DM/Manager, you can actually employ a tool that will let you migrate your existing multidomain infrastructure into a structure containing fewer domains.

Using tools in DM/Manager, you can perform neat tricks such as migrating sets of users and groups from one domain to another while still maintaining the proper mapping of access control lists (ACLs). This capability prevents loss of resource permissions during the migration process. FastLane also provides DC Mover, a tool that lets you move domain controllers from one domain to another. Performing these housekeeping and restructuring tasks will simplify the Win2K migration process and help you deploy products (e.g., Exchange Server) that have flatter domain architectures under NT 4.0. FastLane's products are definitely worth your consideration if you manage large or multisite/multidomain NT networks.