To consolidate 6 different Active Directory sites into 1 Active Directory forest.

The organisation consisted of 6 sites in different countries. Each site was managed by the local Systems Administrator. The Distributed architecture meant it was difficult to maintain users and permissions, lacked a centralized audit trail and hardware resources could not be shared. Applications could not be deployed on a company wide basis hindering knowledge sharing. Users resorted to optical media and traditional post methods to share sensitive data.

Some of the Systems Administrators were resisting this project due to fear of losing control of the allocated site. Company politics also meant the project suffered more setbacks until a favorable solution for all stakeholders could be worked out.

Initially a Proof-of-Concept was created to demonstrate the design. The data containing original users was taken from the production environment and the migration was then simulated. The Administrators based in the European offices were brought into the Head Office and were given training to perform their assigned task during the migration. Sascha was the designated Project Leader who coordinated and executed the migration in a sequential manner.

At all stages of the migration, from Proof-of-Concept to final iteration, the technical documentation for each site was also updated. Even after the migration was completed successfully, the administrators continued to receive mentoring sessions by Sascha in order to maintain the integrity of the newly formed Microsoft Active Directory site.

The Head Office of the organisation gained immediate control of all sites since administration was now centralized. Newly created monitoring checks were effective in maintaining the integrity of the new Active Directory Forest and for auditing user permissions.

The organisation was now more agile in deploying applications to all sites thus  fostering better user collaboration and information sharing.

The mentoring sessions triggered new standard procedures in maintaining user accounts and permissions using one common standard for all the sites in the organisation.