Reaching a Decision

Now that you have a good set of evaluation criteria, you need to decide what software products to buy. If you are new to directory services, you may want to hire a consultant to help with your directory product evaluation. Whether you hire someone or tackle this yourself, it will take some time to make a good decision.

Gathering Basic Product Information

The first step in making your decision is to gather as much information as you can about all the available products that may meet your needs. Use the information you gather about each product to grade it against your evaluation criteria.

You can do this initial fact gathering using data sheets and other information that should be readily available from each vendor's Marketing department. You can usually just visit a vendor's Web site to find most of what you need. You might also draw from independent reviews of directory services software, although magazines and other publications that have performed reviews to date have generally focused on narrow portions of the directory product space, such as NOS directories. Industry analysts and professional consultants are also good sources of information.

Quizzing the Software Vendors

After gathering as much initial information as possible, you should contact people at each prospective vendor and ask to meet with them so that they can tell you about their products and you can ask any remaining questions. Your main goal is to define evaluation criteria and rate each product; however, you should also listen to what the directory vendors have to say because they may tell you something about their product that you have not considered . They may even be able to help you improve your evaluation criteria. Of course, you need to watch out for bias and hidden agendas , and you may need to steer the vendors' conversation back to your own needs if they go too far off topic.

Also ask prospective vendors for a list of reference customers whom you can contact to learn more about how customers are really using the product. If you know of others who have chosen a competitor's product, contact them as well and ask them why they made that choice. When obtaining references from the software vendors, ask to be referred to organizations that are similar to yours and that have undertaken similar directory service deployments.

Challenging the Vendors to Show What Their Products Can Do

If a clear winner has not yet emerged from among the prospective products, you may want to challenge each vendor to show what its software can do and how it will meet your needs. You can do this by asking the vendor to help you with a trial design and a small pilot. This test will help you learn not only how well a vendor's products will work in your own environment, but also what it is like to work closely with the vendor.

You can also invite several vendors to come to your business or a neutral place at the same time and conduct a "bake-off" so that you can perform a head-to-head evaluation. If you do this, make sure that you're prepared with sample data, schema, and benchmarks in hand so that the event is productive. Also don't expect to convince any vendors to participate in this kind of event unless you plan to spend a lot of money on directory services software and support.

Conducting a Directory Services Pilot

Always do your own in-house evaluation and piloting of any software you choose before deploying it. There are always surprises with software, a few of which inevitably are unpleasant and show up only in your environment. The process of creating, running, and learning from a pilot directory service is covered in Chapter 14, Piloting Your Directory Service.

Before you create the pilot service, you may want to do some testing in a controlled environment that is free from distractions. Lab testing is a good way to learn the basics of the software and to see how well it scales and how reliable it is under heavy load. See Chapter 14 for specific ideas on how to conduct useful laboratory tests.

Negotiating the Best Possible Deal

After you have made your final software decision, negotiate the best deal you can. Depending on your requirements, you may want to buy just the software from a vendor, or you may want to negotiate a complete package that includes hardware, software, installation, support, and on-site consulting.

In some cases you also need to take political factors into account. You should fight hard to get the best software available, but if your CEO sits on the board of the same charitable organization as does the CEO of one of the directory software suppliers, your hands may be tied. In that case, use the political relationship to your advantage by asking for a better deal, better support, additional critical features, and so on.

When negotiating with a vendor, be sure to leverage some of the information you gathered as part of your product evaluation. Don't be afraid to tell vendors about the strengths of competitive products and the weaknesses of their own products. Having price information for competitive products in hand is also useful when you're negotiating the best possible deal.