joeware - never stop exploring... :)

So who here likes to run ADAM on their client PCs? Who would like to run the Windows Server 2008 version of ADAM on Vista? Yeah me too.

Microsoft was stupid and didn’t make it so Windows Server 2008 ADAM could be installed on the Client OS. Extremely shortsighted. Extremely silly.

So what we need is for everyone who has a TAM or access to Connect is to report an issue in wanting to install Windows Server 2008 version of ADAM on Vista.

This will help the AD Product Dev group help us as I think they need customer pushes to help do this.

The other solution is to run virtual guests running Windows Server 2008 when you want to test ADAM stuff or AD stuff and that is just silly. SQL folks get a light version of SQL Server to play with on Dev boxes, why do LDAP Devs have to load a whole virtual server?

I expect I am in the minority but I tend to run several instances of ADAM on my laptop directly, they all replicate with each other. That way I have one machine running replicated instances and I don’t have the overhead of a virtual machine. I also run ADAM on all, yes, all of my machines in my house with the exception of my Vista Media Center which I would LIKE to run ADAM on and my Vista laptop which again I would like to run ADAM on. In fact, this is one of the reasons why I haven’t really adopted Vista. ADAM is one of my really want to have on the machine apps. I like ADAM more than I like Vista… hands down; no comparison.

Basically MSFT gave us a very handy little LDAP solution and then they took it away, I would actually love to see LDAP servers running on all client machines. I can see lots of fun uses for it from local phone books to media libraries, etc. While I could use SQL, the ADAM install and config is so much easier than dealing with the SQL crap at least to me.

To be honest, I wish they just kept it as a Web Download now and I wonder how much work it would be to get OpenLDAP to work with Windows Integrated Auth like ADAM did so we can just install and use that instead. I would really like to run ADAM on my Vista and other client machines, but it really comes down to wanting an LDAP application, and if I have to, I would use OpenLDAP directly on the client OS rather than use ADAM on a virtual guest running off of virtual pc/server or whatever on the client OS. Virtual machines have their uses, but this is just stupid to have that as the answer for this problem. I hope whomever at MSFT that needs to, pulls their head up from the weeds and realizes that and fixes this shortcoming.

So if you have a TAM, if you have connect access, log bugs or DCRs that you want to run ADAM (or if you must use the new term ADLDS) on Vista and all client OSes going forward.

  joe