Computer Business Review
27th February 2008
By Sheetal Vyas
Winzero Technologies, a Canada-based provider of enterprise management software services, has released RemoveUnknown, a software application which the company says is the first of its kind and helps clean up Microsoft Windows Servers by removing unknown accounts found in the file, folder and share security permissions.
Winzero says that the constant changes made by users and groups sharing a network of computers in an enterprise and new users logging in and out of the systems, makes it necessary to eliminate unused accounts left behind by the users. These accounts, which remain in the server if they are not eliminated, could pose security problems through unauthorised access.
JP Hann, director of marketing, Winzero, said: "Over the years, we have developed an extensive array of software that supports Microsoft products. The ability to expand our product base and develop software solutions to remove the obstacles to deploy Windows Server 2008 is a huge benefit to our customers by providing the expertise to automate most server tasks, especially the mind-numbing repetitive ones."
The software, the evaluation version for which is available on the company website, centrally audits, reports and deletes unknown accounts. It claims to offer a single click service for IT professionals and enables them to generate immediately unknown accounts reports and delete them if required.
According to Akos Sandor, vice president, Microsoft enterprise solutions for Winzero, the company conducted a survey amongst Windows server administrators to understand their requirements for software applications. It was found that most of them wanted a product that would enable them to offer in-depth reporting and removing unknown accounts from Windows server security permissions.
The three major reasons they used to back their requirement were, administration, security, and migration to Windows Server 2008. Winzero RemoveUnknown addresses all the three areas, said Sandor.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Winzero's RemoveUnknown does the clean-up act for Windows servers
Friday, November 30, 2007
Easing Server Migration
There are five major Windows server migration tools available: Wizero ServerMigrator, Quest Consolidator, Aelita Server Consolidation Wizard, ScriptLogic Secure Copy and PointDev Ideal Migration. Each has its strength and weaknesses.
Winzero ServerMigrator 2007
ServerMigrator includes two basic components: a remote agent and the migration engine. The remote agent is designed to install on source servers to perform server local information collection. At least one migration engine must be installed before any remote agents can be deployed.
One caveat: To perform migration information collection, you need an account that has local administrative rights on both the source and the target servers.
The ServerMigrator interface is clean and very easy to use. 
Figure 1. Winzero ServerMigrator sports a very clean interface outlining the steps to any possible migration scenario: member server, domain controller or network attached storage (NAS) or printer migration. (Click image to view larger version.)
The menu bar displays all the tools you need to support migrations and consolidations. Migrations are simple. Start add the servers, identify source and target servers, identify the administrative account to be used for the migration, automatically deploy required agents (remote agent on the source and migration engine on the target), identify the source folders, identify the target drive and save the migration. From then on, it will run automatically. All migrations are saved and the results are displayed in the user interface.
ServerMigrator includes additional utilities: Home Path Updater, Profile Updater, Multiple Server Names, Printer Migration, Permission Reporting and Local Server Account conversions.
One of the great aspects of this tool is that it allows you to test each migration before you perform it. This saves a lot of time and effort in debugging migration problems because it gives you details of before the migration starts.
So if you want to take the simplest route to migrate your file and print servers, choose Winzero ServerMigrator. It has some minor failings, but ServerMigrator is constantly being upgraded from user input. In short, it provides the best all around migration solution of all the tools reviewed.
Pros: Easy to use, addresses most server migration scenarios, copies local accounts with passwords and lots of useful server tools included.
Cons: User interface is not resizable, no job scheduling at later times, must select root tree folders to migrate and no email notification when the migration is complete.