Untangle Integrates with Microsoft’s Active Directory

Gives small businesses with Microsoft infrastructures an open source advantage


SAN MATEO, Calif. – March 11, 2008 – In the tradition of Zimbra, Samba and other leading open source projects, the Untangle Gateway Platform now integrates with Microsoft’s Active Directory (AD).

Simply put, this enables our customers and channel partners to leverage user and privileges data that already exist in their Microsoft infrastructure. With Untangle’s AD Connector, administrators can view reports, create policies and authenticate Remote Access Portal users by AD user name.

“Let’s face it, almost all small businesses IT is based on Microsoft products. For open source to succeed, it not only has to be easier-to-use and cheaper, but it has to work with Microsoft products” said Dirk Morris, co-founder and CTO of Untangle.

AD is the Microsoft implementation of Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) directory services and is used to provide centralized access control (authentication and authorization) services for Windows computers.

Untangle’s AD Connector leverages AD in three places:

Reports -- Finding network stats and web usage by user just got a lot easier. Untangle reports are now organized by AD user name.
Policy Enforcement – Untangle enables you to create policy groups for different sets of users. For example, a law firm can set up a restrictive web usage policy for admin staff and a less restrictive one for partners. You can now build these policy groups with AD user names.
Remote Access Portal – Untangle’s browser-based remote access application can now authenticate against AD making set-up and management easier.

The Untangle AD Connector is available now, both over the Internet and through Untangle’s channel partners.