Not so long ago, a system administrator was a computer guru who drove the company's Big Iron. Today, Windows NT is taking over; most of today's system administrators have never managed a VMS system or an OS/390, and they probably never will--which is why, when it comes to system administration tools, they don't know what they're missing.

Windows NT's offerings pale in comparison to those of their mainframe predecessors, particularly NT's lackluster user administration features. It's up to third-party software packages to fill the void. NT does not offer a comprehensive solution for delegating authority in a hierarchical fashion, and its reporting on events related to user administration is weak at best.

To view the Report card.To learn how well third-party software picks up the slack, we examined four leading packages--two in each of two separate classes of user admin tools. The first class offers sophisticated, if complex-to-configure, system administration for your site. The two products in this class are Mission Critical Software's Enterprise Administrator (EA) v4.50 and Master Design & Development's Trusted Enterprise Manager (TEM) v2.03. Each offers an enterprise's primary system administrator the ability to delegate subsets of his or her rights and responsibilities to other users and administrators. Both products install their own OS-level services that apply the security model, and they both handle arbitrarily large domains, as well as trust relationships with other domains.

The packages in the second class are much less sophisticated but easier to install and configure. These products offer centralized access to common NT administration tasks that otherwise would be spread across several programs and perhaps require several hours to execute. The two contenders we reviewed in this group--Pukka Software's Domain Admin Tool v2.20 and Adkins Resource's Hyena v1.76 (and v1.8 beta)--will not revolutionize the way your enterprise functions, but they will save you lots of time and spare you some headaches. If you have a smaller installation with moderate security concerns, one of these less-

sophisticated packages may well suit your needs. Neither of them installs its own NT service, butboth interact with NT's native security services. And neither package handles trust relationships with other domains, other than what NT does on its own. While EA and TEM have most of the functionality available in Hyena and Domain Admin Tool, their extra sophistication also makes them more expensive.

We tested each product at our University of Wisconsin-Madison Real-World Labs®, using a Windows NT 4.0 SP3 server as our Primary Domain Controller, and Windows NT workstation and Windows95 as clients. For our tests, we used a 100-Mbps Ethernet network and employed a universe of more than 3,000 users and 300 groups of users.

EA is easily the most feature-packed of the four products, though it's also the most difficult to install and configure. Count on spending several days planning your domain layout and division of resources (both computer and human) before you use it. TEM is a close second to EA. While it's easier to configure and use, it lacks some of the flexibility that EA provides. Its reporting capabilities are also a bit weaker than EA's. In the final analysis, though, either product makes a fine addition to any enterprise, and once you get accustomed to using one or the other, you'll wonder how you ever survived without it.