Quest Software announced general availability of the newest version of its solution for extending Active Directory-based authentication and single sign-on across heterogeneous systems. At the same time, Quest unveiled a new online community, “Inside Vintela,” that provides user interaction, online support and product information, tips and resources to IT professionals using Quest solutions to enhance heterogeneous systems integration within their organizations.

“We are very glad that Quest accepted our invitation to participate in the Interop Vendor Alliance, as their innovative work in heterogeneous integration brings value to our mutual customers,” said Sam Rosenbalm, business development manager, developer and platform strategy group at Microsoft. “Quest’s software and expertise can help our customers move along the continuum toward unified systems management across platforms.”

“Microsoft technologies are the foundation for business computing at many organizations around the world, but as we know, most of these enterprises are also heterogeneous,” said Dave Wilson, vice president, Vintela products, Quest Software. “The ability to extend the powerful capabilities of Microsoft technologies to non-Microsoft platforms is key to success for these organizations.

“Microsoft has purposefully chosen to base its solutions — such as Active Directory, SMS and MOM — on established industry standards,” Wilson continued. “This approach creates an ideal platform upon which to build a unified management infrastructure for the heterogeneous enterprise. Quest provides the enabling technologies that allow organizations to get the most from their investment in Microsoft infrastructure by extending the reach of those capabilities across platforms. We’re very pleased to be among the founding members of the Interop Alliance.” 

Quest’s Vintela Authentication Services enables step-by-step progress toward a single, unified Active Directory-based identity infrastructure that encompasses Unix and Linux systems, users, and applications. Administrators who choose complete migration of Unix identities to Active Directory will benefit from the product’s new wizard for a structured, automated and manageable migration.

The new development community site, Inside Vintela (http://vintela.inside.quest.com), is designed to provide an open forum for prospects and customers of Quest’s heterogeneous integration software products to share best practices, experiences and ideas with their peers. The community also supports interaction with experts from the Quest product management and development teams as well as allowing members to benefit from open communications with other users of Quest’s cross-platform integration products.

Quest products highlighted within the Inside Vintela community include:

* Vintela Authentication Services – allows customers to seamlessly extend the security and compliance of the Microsoft Active Directory infrastructure to Unix and Linux platforms and applications.
* Vintela Single Sign-on for Java – leverages the existing Kerberos support in Active Directory to provide a comprehensive, cross-platform single sign-on solution for J2EE.
* Quest Management Xtensions for SMS – natively extends the change and configuration capabilities of Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003 to Unix, Linux and Mac OS X systems.
* Quest Management Xtensions for MOM – natively extends the operations and event management capabilities of Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 to Unix and Linux systems – including Management Pack authoring capabilities.

The community also includes Resource Central, a collection of software and documentation projects that allow Quest customers to use popular open-source software solutions in conjunction with Quest's commercial Vintela products and support. Resource Central is operated as a collection of true open-source projects, with patches and documentation available in source code form.