Challenge
As a company we were highly geographically diversified with 16 branch offices, several external helpdesks. We shared a common AD but had no common naming standard and no common standard for account creation. We had also had a high cost for account management. In our branch offices we had no, and still don't, IT-professional, that could handle account creation internally. As we're running exchange 2010 account creation was complex and included using two different tools. Also, we wanted to create an internal "phone book" so that we easily could find people with a certain profession, position or such, and easily find the contact information. Lastly we needed a tool that could help us with AD reports, account pruning etc.
Solution
When we stumbled upon Adaxes it was a god send. We did not expect to find a tool that could deliver a complete solution for all of our Directory related needs, but Adaxes combination of a service, a management console and a web interface is nothing short of genius. In one swift move we implemented a solution at an initial cost of about half our yearly expense pertaining to activities that Adaxes now handles. The fact that it does not extend the AD in any way, has an extremely granular rights assignment architecture, complete logging, complete Exchange integration, well the list is too long to go through, makes this tool an absolutely must have for any organization with more than 20 users. Let’s not even go into the automation functionality, it is ridiculously powerful and easy to use. We had a completely configured solution in place in less than a month. The initial learning curve was a bit steep, but the extraordinary support, with outstanding knowledge of the product helped us work out any kinks we had. Today we have no outstanding issues, and whatever we think of throwing at the Adaxes team in terms of functionality requirements they seem to solve immediately, or in the next release.
Benefits
We estimate that we save about three times the yearly cost of the product, compared to when we were using external consultants. As far as benefits not quantifiable in terms och money our users highly value the ability to locally handle all kind of user management issues, the ease of which they can find contact information, especially since it's available through Outlook. As far as the IT department are concerned, we sometimes even forget all about Adaxes since it now is working so well we only have to touch it when upgrading it. Well, that is not entirely true, the management console is by far the best AD tool we've ever come across, but it works so well that you don't even think about it, it's just there and it works, like your arm watch if you'd like.
Adam Nerell
CTO
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