Introduction
Cortex has been designed from the ground up to manage users and services in multiple
Active Directory forests. This unique feature allows Cortex to cope with scenarios
that are simply unachievable for competing platforms.
How?
Isolation of the Core Cortex components (Web UI and SQL) is fundamental. Each Forest
requires a provisioning engine and a web service installed. A new location is created
in Cortex, it's then configured to "talk" to the remote directory through via its
web service and provisioning engine.
Configuration can be changed for each individual location
- Provisioning logic - can be customised for each individual location.
- Available services - each forest can be configured with different services and service
packages.
- Shared or dedicated? - the location can be flagged as dedicated to relax user naming
conventions.
- Reseller support - resellers can be setup to provision to one or multiple forests.
Any AD forest, anywhere
Cortex utilises Microsoft Message Queue to provide a standardised messaging interface.
For remote managed directories MSMQ can be configured to operate over HTTP or HTTPS.
Cortex uses this messaging capability to send and receive messages from remote locations.
Message Queues over HTTP
As the queues can operate over HTTPS it is easy to configure a single Cortex instance
to provision resources in any location.
User Authentication
Users can log on to Cortex with their standard network logon. Cortex identifies
the user and then routes their authentication request to the correct Active Directory
forest.
Uses
Cortex provides a unique solution for automating the provisioning and management
of complex hosted environments.
- Manage large complex shared hosting environments for MS Exchange or SharePoint.
- Offer delegated administration to large or small dedicated active directory instances.
- Manage on-premises equipment.
- Perform all of the above with a single provisioning system.