Centrify releases new, free Mac and Linux integration toolkit for Active Directory

Windows management vendor Centrify this week released Centrify Express, its new integration package for Windows Active Directory services. The software toolkit is a free, lite version of its Centrify Suite, which provides greater policy and identity management capabities, and features such as server isolation and encryption of data-in-motion.

In his blog, Centrify president Tom Kemp said the new software would bring Active Directory control authentication to SMBs and other small organizations. He said these companies would appreciate the growth path to the company's more-capable Centrify Suite.

Third, we were getting requests from many people who had tried other free Active Directory integration tools and found them very unreliable, difficult to deploy on a mass scale, and did not play with existing software such as Samba. We were getting tons of requests from Ubuntu and Red Hat and Mac users asking if we could do better. Our answer was Yes! ...

So instead of providing a one-off toolset for Active Directory authentication, we decided to give away a subset of the same enterprise-hardened technology that our 2,500+ customers have in production on hundreds of thousands of servers today. I think you will find our solution much more reliable and mature compared to other solutions, and be better optimized from a login experience perspective.

But even if you have AD authentication taken care of on your non-Microsoft systems, customers don't want to “manage the management system.” That’s why we are also providing DirectManage Express as part of our Express offering to centrally deploy and/or upgrade our agent on dozens or hundreds of systems.

But before DirectManage Express even does that, DirectManage Express also provide a means to do a centralized and automated pre-install check. The net net is this is a huge time saver over sneakernet and manually checking if a system can become an Active Directory client. DirectManage Express also provides the ability to quickly login to those remote systems via integration with SSH/SNC/VPC, and to view local system accounts, etc.