Case Study - Virtualization and Domain Migration for Brandman/UMass

Brandman University was being acquired by Umass per Board of Education's requirements, they were no longer allowed to use the Brandman domain (brandman.edu) and needed to migrate over to Umass' domain (umassglobal.edu). All internal and external resources, client facing, user accounts, applications, and emails needed to be changed over to the new domain by the deadline set by the BoE. Over 300,000 AD objects were migrated which included staff, faculty, active students and alumni accounts.Client needed a solution to have a single point management of all remote and on-prem devices. They had previously attempted an Intune deployment and a different solution using SCCM, both of which failed. With time winding down on the clock, upgrades were imminent for a third-party application used by the school. This third-party application, Axiom, what it does for the school, why students and teachers need access to it. how this ties in with project?. The software upgrade roll-out was scheduled to be completed 2 months prior to students returning from summer break. If not successful, students would lose the ability to do their schoolwork, teachers would lose the ability to teach, and all would use lose the ability to use the current version of the third-party application, Axiom. The deployment asked of Akins IT would also have to be able to uninstall and reinstall apps on each device. One of these applications was proprietary and rudimentary in its structure that bypassed any current automated way to install, uninstall the update.   

We spun up a new virtual Vmware environment and configured a new on-premise domain and domain controllers. Tools leveraged were the Active Directory migration tool (ADMT) to migrate user accounts from the legacy domain to the new domain. Also leveraged new AD connect with a domain trust to update the Office 365 accounts with the new domain information. Lastly, we used migration wizard (migwiz) to copy the local user data on PCs from the old domain to the new domain. 

We assisted with developing a plan to spin up a new domain on premise so it could coexist with the legacy one. We worked with their on-site IT to coordinate the migration of their on-prem windows ad identities along with migrating their on-prem idenitites to their office 365 cloud identities and ensuring all user data remained intact. Coordinated additional migration planning with the client to determine internal server migration timeline. Due to customized in-house applications and database servers that have multiple dependencies extra care was taken in the coordination of the server cutover.