We recently held an essay contest inviting Micro Focus employees and customers to describe why they love using Micro Focus products. We wanted to know how our users were using Micro Focus products to make their lives—and the lives of their users—easier. Entries were sorted into solution groups and judged by the appropriate Solution Marketer.

This entry was selected as the second-place winner in the File and Networking Services solution group. The author, Sami Kapanen, received the second-place prize of a $200 Amazon Gift Card as well as a Micro Focus community t-shirt.

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By: Sami Kapanen

We at HAMK University have used Storage Manager for years. We started using it with our file servers and wanted to keep the same level of easy management when migrating servers.

When we moved to MS AD based solution, we decided to offer CIFS file services directly from NetApp NAS storage without the extra layer of Windows Servers between clients and storage - and no need for Windows Server reboots! This NetApp solution has worked really well for us, and yes, Storage Manager supports NAS solutions too.

When we did the actual file migrations, we used Storage Manager Cross Empire Migration to do it. It handled all the home directories and also all shared network drives and maintained assigned rights and ownership information.

Currently we are using Storage Manager 5 to provision home directories when new users are created in the MS AD domain by our Micro Focus IDM solution. Storage Manager also copies few files and directories with specific rights from a template, e.g. getting public_html feature working automatically for everyone.

At the end of user accounts lifecycle, the account and home directory are moved to an archive location, getting them away from active backup jobs. Later, when user account is actually deleted, home directory is deleted too. This process uses Storage Managers OU based storage policies and does not require any manual work.

HAMK University is located in southern Finland, with 8000 students and 600 staff members.