I'd like to see the ability to integrate with Active Directory for job management security. Rather than maintain a userlist within Vcron itself, it'd be nice to be able to pull users from a AD Security group or similar. In my head I could see each job having 'viewers,' 'executors,' 'editors,' etc etc

I must have requested this on 2 separate occasions already ... to be honest I don't understand the reluctance of the VC developers to seriously look at this. VC is a native windows app so you don't have to worry about catering for different OS environments like Linux; apart from users that use VC for desktop automation most server environments (NT/2000/2003) must be hooking into either Windows AD or a PDC.

If the developers don't want to write ADhelpers etc at least they should think of providing basic Windows User integration to the security model. For example if you take Microsoft SourceSafe which like VC also has a separate User/Password database all Microsoft did to allow Windows integration was to add an option to authenticate on the basis of if the Windows Username on the client is the same as the SourceSafe Username. The same strategy could easily be employed since VC already knows your Windows Username when you logon - look @ the Server Connections Window.

Secondly and much more importantly I could not agree more about the overall security in VC. It should be at Job level with UNIX style rwx permissions. At the moment there is no way of separating sysadmin and daily operational jobs. Any VC user can start any Job which has left me not being able to use the full potential of VC for fear that an operator could accidentally start the wrong job...

We use VC exclusively on Window Servers and the lack of Job security and Windows User integration has and will continue to stall the growth of VC with-in our environment.

Lastly it would be helpful if the developers could release a roadmap with their immediate and future plans for the product.

We are thinking about this (AD integration). But we wanted to prioritize indepency of other systems first.

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We have a couple of posts regarding this. We would like to discuss this here and please answer our questions:

http://www.visualcron.co...amp;m=5893&#post5893 

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I really hope that we can get some resolution regarding AD integrated security into Visual Cron this time around.

To be clear, the first requirement is that a user be authenticated using AD instead of the internal VC username/password. The reason is two-fold; to remove a security audit finding whereby the VC password does not adhere to company policies i.e. password length, aging etc. Secondly only users authenticated onto our company LAN can access a VC session.

As I suggested before, that by following a strategy of providing an option to map a Windows User to an internal VC User limits the impact of changes to VC and users not needing this functionality. VC already holds the Windows User name in the connection properties of a session. So if an incoming login request matches a mapped name VC simply bypasses the normal username/password login procedure. All security with-in VC is still controlled by the internal VC username. This methodology is employed by systems which have their own security mechanisms, like Cognos & MS Visual SourceSafe which need to integrate into external authentication systems.

Secondly the area that really does need attention and a total re-write is the simplistic way VC user rights are controlled. Until user rights can be assigned to individual jobs, implementing VC across an enterprise remains problematic.

Please continue discussion here and test this version:

http://www.visualcron.co....aspx?g=posts&m=6509 

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