Hosted Messaging and Collaboration Solution Centralized - Hosting Providers

Centralized Management - Hosted Messaging and Collaboration

Reduce time spent updating server policies from 90 minutes to 5 minutes¹

Active Directory is the heart of the Hosted Messaging and Collaboration centralized management solution. Active Directory is a highly scalable Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) directory service that can be used natively by components included with Microsoft Windows. As the heart of the Hosted Messaging and Collaboration centralized management solution, Active Directory allows data center personnel to create and manage server and user privileges, authentication, and security far more efficiently than with a local server management implementation. The centralized model reduces operational complexity, improves security, and lowers risk through consistent policy application.

Why Centralized Management?

To meet access and security requirements, you can use locally managed servers, users, accounts, and security policies on each hosted server. However, this is a time-intensive process with many opportunities for manual errors; this is why a centrally managed infrastructure is recommended.

A centralized management system allows you to create and manage server and user privileges, authentication, and security within your hosting environment far more efficiently than by using local user accounts and individual server management. Using centralized management reduces operational complexity, improves security, and lowers risk through consistent policy application.

Implementing a centrally managed solution with Active Directory provides the following benefits:

Simple model: A powerful yet simple model for managing user accounts and associated rights for the service provider staff, Centralized Management eliminates the confusion that exists when accounts and passwords are maintained locally on each server.
Security and cost efficiencies: Active Directory for server management provides a central point of management for all user accounts and access rights for your staff, along with many required security lockdown processes. This central model reduces complexity and increases security by maintaining clear roles and permissions for each system administration task. As a result, centralized server management reduces the cost per managed server.
Delegated reseller and customer administration: Active Directory for user management facilitates delegated administration for resellers and customers, enabling their administrators to perform tasks such as adding users and changing passwords. This improves the customer experience by streamlining operations and improving service turnaround. Active Directory also reduces your operational costs by decreasing support calls and system administration tasks.
Enhanced user management: Active Directory enables you to use Group Policies to define configurations and enforce states across groups of users and servers in significantly less time than it takes to set policies manually

Integration with Other Solution Technologies

Centralized management provides services and support for the following technologies in the Microsoft Solution for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration:

Service provisioning
Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Hosting
Update management
Monitoring and reporting

In addition to these Hosted Messaging and Collaboration technologies, non-Microsoft applications can access user information for LDAP, where Active Directory provides directory-enabled applications with a rich set of user information and properties.

Delegation and Self-Administration Features

Service Provider Administrator: Delegated rights to manage all customer objects and data.
Service Provider User: Delegated permissions to read all customer objects and data and manage self.
Reseller Administrator: Delegated permissions to manage reseller container and all customer objects beneath.
Reseller User: Delegated permissions to read only data in the reseller container and manage self with no access to customer objects.
Customer Administrator: Delegated permissions to manage all customer-related objects in container.
Customer User: Delegated permissions to manage self and read data in the customer container.

Scripts and Automated Procedures

You can also use a variety of centralized management scripts that are included with the solution to speed deployment of your centralized management platform. The scripts secure the recommended organizational unit (OU) structure and can help you migrate existing users and servers to the Active Directory directory service.

¹ Source: IPOWER