A Cheater’s Guide to DTS Packages

Let me just say, at this point, that SQL was a mystery to me before I started working with MIIS. I’d always looked at it from a sys admin point of view – set up the server, install SQL, maybe even do some patching, and then hand it straight over to the DB people. But…

Adding Exchange 2003 Mailboxes to Existing Accounts

Here’s another trick that is really very simple, but, for reasons I can’t figure out, difficult to find out about. Despite what the documentation seems to say (and despite what I have read MS employees categorically stating), you CAN add an Exchange mailbox to an account that already exists in AD. Bundled with MIIS are…

Delta and Multivalued Combined

I’ve already covered how to create a multivalue table for SQL MAs; and I’ve also talked about generating Delta tables for single-valued attributes. If you are doing multivalue imports from SQL you are really going to want to get Delta imports working there too – those babies can be sllloooowww. We need two tables for multivalue…

Attribute-Level Imports

MIIS gives you the option of specifying individual attributes to include in your delta import. Presumably you could use this to specify which single-valued attribute to import (perhaps the Surname has changed, but nothing else has), but I’d be surprised if you got much of a performance improvement compared to just re-importing the whole row….

Creating an Extensible MA

Here’s a quick walkthrough of creating an XMA. It’s by no means complete or authoritative, and just shows a method I’ve found success with. The example is creating Netware home directories, something I recognize most people don’t need to do these days, but it’s a flexible method which I have used for other scenarios as…

Metaverse Design and Attribute Names

Here’s something I wish I’d known at the start: it’s ok to delete all the default objects and attributes from the metaverse, and just create the ones you need.   And here’s something else I wish I’d figured out earlier: you need less object types in the metaverse than you may think.   When I…

Extensible MAs are fab!

Like many people I expect, I approached my first Extensible MA (XMA) with some caution. (On my Advanced MIIS course the other participants didn’t even want to cover the section on Extensible MAs, preferring to see a demo of the, as yet unreleased, password portal.) But once I got one going I was completely taken…

Connecting MIIS to eDirectory

When setting up an eDirectory MA I found I had to install the Netware server certificate as a Trusted Root Authority. This is the way I did it: Open ConsoleOne Browse to the OU of the server you wish to attach to from MIIS (it needs to be one with a copy of all partitions…

How to make SQL Delta tables

As I covered in the SQL efficiency post, I snapshot my SQL views to a table before importing. So while I’m doing that I may as well compare it to the last snapshot, and get myself a nice, quick to import, delta table. Let’s say I have a view called PeopleData. I also need the…

Speeding up Import times from SQL MAs

1. Snapshot Views to Tables If you are using a view to bring data from different tables into one location you may well find that your import times improve dramatically when you first copy the data into a table. Create a Table with the same fields as the view, in the same order. Take care…