Active directory is not a separate product like the others it is very much a core part of Windows Server. Unless you think AAA parts of an OS are a separate product from the OS, AD is very much tied to Windows.
You could turn AD into just another identity management platform, but you would pretty much lose everything that makes AD awesome. AD is impressive because it is so integral and closely tied to Windows. It begins to lose its lustre when you integrate other platforms because when you lose that close coupling, there's nothing but a distributed user authentication store.
I'm not sure what else you want from a directory server but a "distributed user authentication store." Maybe you're referring to file and print services? Email server integration? All of these kinds of things should be available, regardless of what platform the directory server is running on.
I'd make some long argument about the Linux market longing for an easy-to-use directory server, but I see that Novell Directory Services still lives on as NetIQ, and I've never heard of anyone using it, so maybe the market just isn't there. (Another victim of Microsoft's monopoly.) So maybe it doesn't matter that AD isn't platform independent. I guess companies running a lot of Linux are happy to hassle with the nightmare that is OpenLDAP.
The various open source solutions that Oracle EOL'd which are now offered by ForgeRock have seemed to be decent alternatives in this space, but of course they are now making the source less accessible:
> Active directory is not a separate product like the others it is very much a core part of Windows Server. Unless you think AAA parts of an OS are a separate product from the OS, AD is very much tied to Windows.
Which is aggravating when you want to setup a test environment.
Active directory is not a separate product like the others it is very much a core part of Windows Server. Unless you think AAA parts of an OS are a separate product from the OS, AD is very much tied to Windows.
You could turn AD into just another identity management platform, but you would pretty much lose everything that makes AD awesome. AD is impressive because it is so integral and closely tied to Windows. It begins to lose its lustre when you integrate other platforms because when you lose that close coupling, there's nothing but a distributed user authentication store.