Overview

Recently, two regional electrical product services organizations merged to become one of the 50 largest electrical supply distributors in the United States. Acquisitions and mergers like these typically involve a certain level of system and user consolidation to realize cost savings and productivity gains. One of the top priorities for these newly formed organizations is merging Active Directories (AD) and email platforms.

While the client had a vision for the desired future state of mail and identities within the combined organization, implementing this vision proved challenging. Fortunately, they found a partner in Oakwood, a company with extensive experience in scoping, preparing, and executing projects of this nature.

Business Challenge

The merger of two companies into a single corporate entity created challenges for the internal IT Team when it came to managing its users across various platforms. They faced a challenging user permission and content migration project in moving content, mail, and user data from Google to M365.

Solution

To prepare a critical component of the information technology infrastructure for the new Agilix corporate entity, client sponsors had requested Oakwood’s assistance with a new Active Directory, email, and M365 environment buildout and migration. These will serve as the repositories for the new users, machines, mail, and calendars, as well as provide the enterprise-grade communication and collaboration solution for Agilix.

The Oakwood Team recommended that this engagement be delivered across four phases as defined within our Delivery Excelleration Methodology. Based on past client engagements, this trusted structure has yielded outstanding client outcomes and is comprised of the following phases: Identify, Design, Build, and Deploy.

In order to deliver a successful outcome, it was critical that the Oakwood Team work with client stakeholders to understand the current environment to complete a proper migration path. This involved performing a thorough discovery of the entire Active Directory (AD) environment, including the AD forest functional level, number of users and objects, current OU structure and AD schema, and number and locations of AD DCs.

With questions answered regarding Active Directory, Oakwood then sought to understand the current Google Workspace environment for IAC. This involved documenting the number (and sizes) of existing mailboxes, quantity of members (or groups), mail flow rules, SSO integrations, IP and domain whitelists/blacklists, and more.

Once the necessary information and processes were identified, it was time to move through the Design & Build phases. First came the Azure Active Directory & forest build. A new server architecture was required to support the new AD environment for the new corporate entity. In part, the Oakwood Team deployed and configured two Active Directory Domain Controllers. Oakwood then created a new Active Directory Forest and configured all applicable settings and objects, including DNS, DHCP, and group policy objects (GPOs). After deployment, the team remedied any configuration errors or issues. Finally, all required user and device objects were populated into the new AD forest, and ADMT was leveraged to facilitate the migration of hundreds of AD users and computer objects.

The second piece of the build phase was to set up the new Microsoft 365 tenant and synchronize Azure Active Directory. The team provisioned the required licensing to the tenant and ensured all prerequisites were met for synchronization of user objects to Azure AD. With deployment nearing completion, Oakwood needed to define and deploy role-based access controls (RBAC) and permissions appropriate to all applicable M365 environment administrators. This included deploying conditional access security policies and multi-factor authentication (MFA) enforcement on any highly privileged M365 accounts.

Lastly was the migration of email and content. Oakwood assigned licenses to all users in the new environment and created all shared, room, and resource mailboxes while recommending to project stakeholders the selection of an email and content migration tool. Once selected, Oakwood migrated all user mailboxes and contents from the source Exchange environment of the client to the target M365 destination tenant. They also migrated all user mailboxes and personal Google Drives from the source Google Workspace environment to the target M365 destination tenant.

Conclusion

Migrations like these are no easy task. However, the Oakwood Team has years of experience dealing with migrations of various size and complexities. They leveraged their processes and past experiences so as to mitigate knows challenges that were sure to arise along the way. Oakwood’s client now has the confidence to manage all of the content and users within their newly formed corporate environment.

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