Perraju Bendapudi and Rajesh Jalan Microsoft Research
Perraju Bendapudi worked as Development Manager for SFU in the Windows group and is currently Architect for Incubations at IDC. Rajesh Jalan was the Development Lead for SFU and is currently the Development Manager for SFU.

Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX (SFU) provides a range of cross-platform network services that help to integrate Windows and UNIX-based environments. It provides seamless access to information stored in multiple platforms, consolidates network management across platforms, and reuses UNIX applications and scripts on Windows. It provides NFS server and client, POSIX subsystem which provides UNIX layer on NT and Server for NIS and password mapping. It allows you to run your Windows machine through a Unix shell by mapping directly to Active Directory (AD). SFU 3.5 is available as a free download (223MB download, when installed needs 275MB). More information is at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/sfu. The talk will focus on the following: 1. What are NIS and AD (Active Directory)? 2. What problems were we trying to solve with Server for NIS? 3. What support does AD provide? 4. How did the SFU team at Microsoft implement the solution 5. A comparison of other solutions the team came up and reasons for choosing the final solution 6. Limitations due to NIS protocol or AD, other solutions similar to this and pros/cons of those. 7. Conclude with a discussion on future solutions the team plans to work on.