Using Ac+ve Directory and LDAP for directory management kept in sync

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3 Using Ac+ve Directory and LDAP for directory management kept in sync 3

4 3 different evalua+on star+ng in mid s: First: Inconclusive reluctance to move off of homegrown system BlitzMail Second: Evaluated MS Live and Google Apps; recommended Google; decided to do another evalua+on with MS BPOS instead of MS Live Third: Evaluated MS BPOS and Google Apps 4

5 Why Google Apps? Many students and faculty already using it. It s not MicrosoV! 5

6 Keep on- premises Exchange: Acted as con+ngency plan in emergency if the cloud was down; it s working, let s not make the project more complicated than it needs to be; we ll make this decision later. Centrally migrate user and calendar data: Data migra+on was strong user requirement; we control the project +meframe; saves user +me and frustra+on; users wouldn t easily be able to migrate calendar data. Support mul+ple clients: Many different clients already in use; needed to con+nue suppor+ng Exchange- friendly clients to ease transi+on for faculty/staff. Route all incoming mail through on- prem mailhubs: Necessary because mul+ple mail services using same domain name (on- prem Dartmouth, on- prem B- school, cloud Dartmouth) was most expedi+ous rou+ng scheme Use on- prem spam filter (Spam Assassin): needed to use for incoming on- prem mail anyway; found that having on- prem and cloud spam filtering cause undesirable results; solu+on was to only use on- prem spam service and turn off spam filtering in clients/owa works well. NetID rollout Iden+ty Management project happening concurrently; changing username for Dartmouth creden+als to ne+d; decided rollout ne+d change at same +me as change; official Dartmouth address was [email protected], with canonical name address as primary SMTP address (alias). aliases: In old BlitzMail system, users could have up to 5 nicknames for 6

7 RDP involvement was painful a lot of things from licensing process to federa+on didn t work smoothly; it was hard to run a project with these variables. However, we had an assigned solu+ons engineer, which was great! He had access to all the right resources in MSFT. Set up a complete replica of the produc+on environment, including all the on- prem components: on- prem Exchange, AD, ADFS, DirSync, etc. Migra+on team was primarily change management support: user migra+on prepara+on; post- migra+on deskside support; huge scheduling and tracking effort! Decided not to roll out all components of Office 365 at once: keep it simple; didn t really have resources in place to support SharePoint use. 7

8 Decision: Users felt the evalua+on process and product recommenda+on (Google) was not respected = li@le tolerance for O365 differences/issues O365 new: All the wrinkles weren t yet ironed out made our implementa+on prep challenging, but were resolved by go- live. Under- es+mated change management effort: When project first started, li@le funding available due to recession, so tried to develop a plan that relied on internal staff to support transi+on; aver ini+al pilot rollouts, had to stop and recalibrate - user expecta+ons about low disrup+on were not being met; EVP Fin&Admin provided funding needed ($1M) User expecta+ons high: We provided high- touch support before, during, aver mailbox migra+ons, with desk- side support, drop- in help clinics, lots of training workshops and reference materials. Mac func+onality not on par: clients for Mac (Outlook 2011/Appl ) don t work quite as well with Exchange; mostly in the calendaring and directory areas; Dartmouth has high percentage of Mac users (50% faculty/staff, 90% student). Keeping track of people: Migra+ons scheduled by department/class; people were constantly leaving and changing departments; was full- +me job; we created a special web app to gather info from users and track their migra+on status +ed into LDAP so we could verify status right up un+l migra+on night. Data migra+on not 100%: Going from old IMAP- based system to Exchange; special 8

9 A lot of users really appreciate the increase in /calendar func+onality: message formarng, in par+cular. Integrated /calendar: Great produc+vity boost for Dartmouth users; old systems were separate. Larger mailbox: Old system only provide 600MB per user; now have 25GB. Big sigh of relief! Cost savings: Personnel formerly managing old /calendaring systems (~1FTE) have been redeployed to other work; able to remove substan+al amount of hardware and storage from /calendar service (re- purposed). Unified campus comm+coll: Everyone is on same toolset, now; full integra+on achieved between on- prem and cloud Exchange - can t really tell if someone is in cloud or on- prem; can see free- busy info on B- school calendars now; wai+ng for delegated sharing to be able to fully integrate B- school and med- school. 9

10 Lync: Communica+on culture was built around ; IM and audio/video chat is slowly catching on. Easy to use. Staff are clamoring for SP; some have been exposed to on- prem SP service and know what it can do want it badly! Now SkyDrive is bundled w/sp Online, has caused a pause to figure out how to posi+on that product among our other file- sharing services holding up deployment of SP. O365 has had a few service glitches, but nothing major some of the issues were ours (Internet connec+vity, cer+ficate expira+on on auth server, etc.) Recent Wave 15 upgrade cause a number of func+onal issues with OWA and clients nothing catastrophic, though. Could have been smoother. MSFT support: Now that we no longer have dedicated support, we are small fish in pond and have to get in line with everyone else can be frustra+ng! 10

11 Avoid central data migra+on: This was a difficult task to do well and used a lot of resources. When affiliated med ctr moved from BlitzMail to Exchange, they asked their users to migra+on their own mail, if they were interested; kept old system running in read- only mode for a couple of years to allow +me to move data. If you re considering have two different system (e.g., Google and Office 365), I would put at least faculty and staff in the same system for calendaring purposes; students can be in a different system, if needed. Underes+ma+ng impact of system change: Seen as a fundamental tool that has to work well; very low tolerance for mail disrup+on; users have been very crea+ve in how they incorporate the use of in their work processes at Dartmouth: note- taking, programming text editor, group lists Break down the project: big bang cutover is ideal, but may not be feasible from a support perspec+ve that was the case with Dartmouth (~17,000 accounts). Tes+ng: The key to minimizing nega+ve surprises, especially with the federa+on, rich co- existence configura+ons. 11

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