1.2 What DRA and EXA Provide

DRA and ExA allow you to manage your enterprise within the context of a dynamic security model. This model ensures that your enterprise management and security remains current as your enterprise changes and evolves.

DRA and ExA provide advanced delegation and robust, policy-based administration features that improve the security and efficiency of your Microsoft Windows environment. They provide a secure, integrated administration solution for the following environments:

DRA and ExA offer significant flexibility using patented ActiveView technology and granular delegation. An ActiveView is a dynamic set of objects, such as user accounts or computers, that you want an administrator to collectively manage. ActiveViews can include or exclude objects from multiple domains, OUs, and groups into virtual containers for easy administration. With ActiveViews, administrators only sees the objects they can manage, without exposing them to the other objects present across the managed environment.

Granular delegation lets you securely distribute specific tasks, such as resetting a user password or modifying Microsoft Exchange mailbox rights. The flexibility of ActiveViews helps eliminate many of the problems associated with managing data in difficult-to-change, hierarchical structures.

DRA and ExA also help you assure compliance with internal policies and with regulatory requirements. For example, DRA offers dual‑key security, so you can require two people to independently confirm portions of the same workflow. You can delegate one administrator to send a user account to the Recycle Bin, and another administrator to review the action and either approve the decision or revoke the change. DRA provides additional reports, logging, and auditing capabilities to help you demonstrate compliance with policies and with regulatory requirements.

With the Web Console, DRA and ExA provide out-of-the-box relief where you want to delegate administrative tasks, but do not want to deploy the product console. For example, you may want employees to manage their personal information, or provide limited privileges to a Help Desk organization. This easy-to-use, task-based interface significantly reduces administration time and lets you securely delegate specific tasks without additional training. You can quickly and easily customize the scope of the administration tasks you want to make available from the Web Console

These technologies seamlessly join and manage data from multiple sources across your enterprise, including Active Directory, Office 365, Microsoft Exchange, and computer resources. To further expand these benefits, DRA and ExA let you apply policies to directory updates that can extend beyond the directory itself to other applications and databases, making the task of enterprise management easy.

DRA lets you define administration policies that it then automatically propagates and enforces for all DRA users, increasing security and reducing administration costs. This model is dynamic, so as your enterprise changes, objects inherit the appropriate level of security.

DRA and ExA help you automate and streamline many routine administration tasks, such as creating a user account and home share for a new employee. While many automated Active Directory administration tasks are provided out-of-the-box, you can also extend DRA and ExA using well-known standard interfaces such as the Active Directory Service Interfaces (ADSI) and Windows Terminal Server (WTS). DRA and ExA also provide tools, such as DRA PowerShell modules, a DRA REST API, automation triggers, and the DRA Software Development Kit (SDK), so you can integrate enterprise administration with your current business systems.

DRA supports the 64-bit platform, which provides you with increased scalability, increased performance, reduced query time, and more effective use of memory.

Using state-of-the-art technology, these products provide the features you need to create a more secure, productive, and manageable Active Directory and Microsoft Exchange environment.