NT PORT and Windows 2000 Server

[Greg Duncan <greg@towersoft.com.au>]

Is anyone aware of the tight binding of Miscrosoft's Active Directory
Service (ADS) and the soon to be released Windows 2000 server.

As I understand it, if your NT5 server is a PDC, then it must have
Microsoft's ADS, as it is tightly bound to the operating system and the
DNS services.

Does this leave a place for OpenLDAP within the NT environment? I surely
hope so and certainly have not investigated so deeply as to say either
way and as I have to deploy software on various flavours of windows, I
certainly prefer "Open Software".

I would be very interested in opinions from other memebers who may have
used NT5 and have opinions on this issue.

Active Directory Services Interface ....

Has anybody given thought to leveraging the the SDK for the windows
environment, I offer this quote from MSDN. Yes, I know a hundred reasons
why we shouldn't, but it is an interesting piece of information.

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for Microsoft Service
The Microsoft® Active Directory Service Interfaces (ADSI) Provider
Version 1.0 allows ADO to access heterogeneous directory services
through ADSI. This gives ADO applications read-only access to the
Microsoft Windows NT® 4.0 directory services, as well as to any LDAP
compliant directory service and Novell Directory Services. ADSI itself
is based on a provider model, so if there is a new provider giving
access to another directory, the ADO application will be able to access
it seamlessly. The ADSI provider is free-threaded and unicode-enabled. 

Greg Duncan
Senior Software Engineer
TOWER Software
Australia