Christophe Bach

Ruralco is an Australian diversified agricultural company, which provides real estate, insurance, auctioneer services, agricultural equipment and other services to the Australian rural community. It has expanded via a series of mergers into a billion-dollar company.

Key Project Objectives:

• Active Directory’s Objects audit (Users, Contacts, Security Groups, etc.).
• Migrate ~1.500 users from Lotus Notes to the Microsoft Office 365.
• MigrationWiz and PowerShell were key migration tools.
• Integration of HR’s software and Active Directory via PowerShell scripting.
• Train the level 2 & 3 support / BAU team.

The project team consisted of 3 members: a project manager, a project architect, and a global architect. Christophe entered this project after a first failed attempt, therefore, he had to reverse engineer to solidify and validate the migration process.

Challenges:

• Clean up the obsolete users and computer accounts from Active Directory and validate all the prerequisites to a clean sync with Azure AD.
• After a summary audit, he had identified two warning points.
• With the global architect we scope the impact and fix it (Object fields not compliant, users or fields’ information duplicated).
• Keep the Active Directory up-to-date with the Domino directory.
• Christophe edited a PowerShell script to get the Domino information, to make the delta with Active Directory and to apply the modification (all modifications were logged and sent to the administration team).
• Keep the users’ delegations from Domino.
• Two points are important for this step, the change management, and the technical/cost possibility. Because Lotus Notes and Exchange don’t offer the same functionality.

Technical environment:

• Office 365, Active Directory & AADSync, PowerShell
• IBM Domino 8.5 & Lotus Notes
• MigrationWiz

Webhelp expressed the need to migrate its Exchange 2003, 2007 and 2010 messaging platforms from subsidiary to Office 365 for more than 8.000 users. Webhelp develops solutions that grow client’s business and increase customer’s advocacy. They are located in France, Algeria, Morocco, Romania, United Kingdom and the Netherlands.

Key Project Objectives:

• Validate the global Active Directory before the migration
  • Workshops, audit, and recommendations.
  • Take consideration of the Active Director migration in progress from Algeria and Morocco, with Microsoft FIM synchronization.
• Design a migration solution
  • Workshops to explain the details of all the migrations to Office 365.
• POC and Pilot to migrate ~8.000 users from Microsoft Exchange servers to the Microsoft Office 365
  • The migration was done with Office 365 tools.

The project team consisted of 3 members:

• One project director
• One project architect
• One engineer (Christophe)

Challenges:

• Participate in the design of the migration process. The project architect was stacked on the Binary Tree engine, the mission was to define each task for each step of the migration process.
• PowerShell script edition to automate the migration, validation of the prerequisites, employ best practices for the migration.
• Direct/lead the IT support managers who then train 100+ IT support staff worldwide.

Technical environment:

• Office 365
• IBM Domino 8.5 & Lotus Notes
• Binary Tree solution: Migration & Coexistence engines
• Active Directory & DirSync
• PowerShell