case study

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Brunswick Group

Brunswick is a corporate communications partnership. They provide informed advice at a senior level to businesses and other organisations around the world, helping them to address critical communications challenges that may affect their valuation, reputation or ability to achieve their ambitions.

Requirement

Despite having only 200 users, the Brunswick organisational topology is spread over several continents. This meant that careful planning was required to ensure a smooth migration from NT4.0 to AD 2003 and that all local support staff was capable of maintaining the new environment.

Shift F7 were engaged to provide guidance in designing the Active Directory structure, high level training to further develop the network teams understanding of Active Directory, Management of the project, and to provide 2nd-3rd line support during the project.

Implementation

Planning was first taken at a purely conceptual level with no regard for the current environment or budget. This is normally a simple list of features and desires that all parties wish to have implemented. Armed with this initial list, we were able to go through each one and establish a level of urgency as well as suggest others that in our experience would benefit the client. Eventually the conceptual model was used to derive several feasible models each one following the other in a logical fashion until the long term goals were implemented. In addition to this the initial migration plan and methodology was established based on a rationalisation of services and topology etc.

Once the goals and migration method had been decided, and a step by step, fully tested, migration plan was completed, we were able to perform the live implementation. Once the central 2003 Active Directory environment had been established in the production environment, the rollout to each satellite office could commence. However, in many cases theses offices were in their own NT4 domain which did not fit within the restructured infrastructure, therefore a rolling replacement method was used to systematically replace the local domain controllers in each location with new 2003 servers. The replaced servers where then given a clean install and configured for the next location.

Project Conclusion

The majority of the project was involved in the understanding of the environment and the planning of the AD design and rollout.

The role of the test environment was invaluable and demonstrated that this part of the deployment process cannot be excluded as it highlighted on several occasions, possible issues with legacy services and client access.

The actual deployment was routine and without issue. However, the global rollout did stumble at some locations due to slow replication. This did not cause any major problems as the rollout plan took account of such eventualities.

www.brunswickgroup.com