Our test bed consisted of six Dell PowerEdge 2650 dual-Pentium 3 933-MHz servers, each with 1 GB of RAM. Our domain controller ran Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition with Active Directory, Internet Information Server (IIS) 6.0 and a SQL 2000 database server. We then added two Windows 2000 servers, both running IIS 5.0, and one running Exchange Server 2000. Our objective with the Exchange server was to integrate the products under test with OWA (Outlook Web Access). A fourth server ran Red Hat Linux Enterprise Advanced Edition 3 with an Apache X Web server and a MySQL database. The remaining two servers were left open for vendors to install the OS and software of their choice.
The Windows-based Web servers hosted ASPs (Active Server Pages) that connected to our Microsoft SQL 2000 server to provide authentication components and dynamic content. Our Unix server hosted PHP content that connected to our MySQL database, which also provided authentication components. We imported 20,000 users from an LDIF file into both Active Directory and a Sun One Directory.
For testing, we set up various protected resources and policies within each product and attempted to access them from a standard Web browser. We then created various roles, user groups and policies, and granted or denied access to specific users. We also took delegated administration and self-service features for a spin. This let us test the actual features and familiarize ourselves with the management interface, to gauge how easy it would be to operate on a day-to-day basis in a real-world environment. Finally, we tested some of the software's noteworthy features, such as federated identity management support and report-customization capabilities, which played a role in our overall evaluation.
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