CASE STUDY - Studio 3xd Restructures One Choice Mortgage Active Directory Network
Studio 3xd Restructures One Choice Mortgage Active Directory Network
One Choice Mortgage is a privately owned mortgage company that was incorporated on July 26, 2001 and grew from a handful of employees to over 20 employees in less than four years. With the rapid growth came an ever-expanding need to support the technology infrastructure. Like many small businesses, One Choice did not have the need or the budget for a full-time IT professional on staff, so the management of the network, workstations and Web site were shared between a variety of IT firms and consultants. One Choice originally retained Studio 3xd's services for some minor infrastructure tuning, configurations and installations.
Solution Profile Summary
Initially, One Choice wanted Studio 3xd to migrate them away from their hosting provider and configure Microsoft Exchange Server to handle their internal and external e-mail. After initial visit, Studio 3xd recognized that the One Choice network was in desperate need of major overhaul due to years of ad-hoc fixes by various vendors which left the network working but highly unstable leaving One Choice vulnerable to frequent downtime. The quick fixes and a lack of a solid network plan required Studio 3xd to devise a three-phased-approach to implement a more reliable network as well as educate the One Choice staff to manage the day-to-day operations of managing their network infrastructure.
Results Summary
- A more stable and reliable network infrastructure with a measurable improvement in uptime and performance
- Increased security coverage across the domain with a client server anti-virus strategy and Exchange specific anti-virus software configuration
- A network with the ability to expand with the needs of a growing company
- An organized network plan with ongoing support for desktop and server maintenance
- The migration of the onchoicemort.com Web site hosting internally
- The migration of e-mail services to be managed internally allowing for growth of employees with no additional costs
- An ongoing outsourcing partnership with an IT consulting company with an annual cost savings of approximately $25,000
Implementation
Phase 1 – Implementation of Microsoft Exchange Server and Network Security Implementation
Studio 3xd installed a new server to run Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, during which time they uncovered several underlying critical issues. The first problem was that One Choice had been logging users into machines under different profiles. Studio 3xd recreated the correct profiles for 75% of the machines on the domain and set the right users with the correct profiles on the correct machines. Studio 3xd installed and configured the new Exchange server which enabled One Choice Mortgage to manage their own e-mail services. The final step was to install Norton Ant-Virus for Exchange and Norton Anti-Virus Corporate edition. These security measures allowed for centralized distribution of virus definitions from one server as they are available.
Results
Studio 3xd then configured all of the clients to pull mail from the new Exchange server and by the end of the evening; One Choice Mortgage was handling their own e-mail with some help from Studio 3xd. One Choice Mortgage now benefits by handling its own e-mail and taking full advantage of some Enterprise level features of Exchange like Outlook Web Access and Outlook 2003 collaboration features.
Phase 2 – Migration of company Web site, secondary domain controller and naming conventions
In the second phase of the project Studio 3xd was commissioned to migrate the One Choice Mortgage Web site www.onechoicemort.com away from its current hosting provider, integrate a second domain controller and coordinate a naming convention for all devices on the network. Migrating the Web site was a fairly simple task and Studio 3xd accomplished it by first pulling all of the files off of the existing hosting provider ahead of time. The DNS was then outsourced to Studio 3xd to manage and the name servers were set in motion to point to the new server hosted at One Choice prior to the projected go-live for the Web site. The files were then transferred to the designated machine that would be hosting the Web site in-house. The Web site was ready to go on the new server once the destination IP was updated in the DNS entry. The IP was changed and a seamless transition from the hosting provider to the Web site in-house occurred.
The next task of implementing a second domain controller would prove to be more challenging. Studio 3xd began by converting an existing workstation to a Microsoft Windows 2003 server. Once the Operating System was installed, Studio 3xd’s Infrastructure Lead started on promoting the server to a Domain Controller. The promotion went flawlessly but when it came to move the necessary services from the primary domain controller to the new server, Studio 3xd encountered problems. On close inspection of the server logs of the primary domain controller, the team determined that there was a critically high level of corruption in the Active Directory database and that the implementation of the second domain controller would not be possible preventing One Choice from adding an additional domain controller or addressing the corruption with the existing server. Furthermore, the entire domain, being dependant on Active Directory, was critically unstable. After a through investigation by Studio 3xd, the addition of the second domain controller was not possible and the planning of a complete domain rebuild was set in motion.
Results
Studio 3xd provided additional support such as setting up FTP sites and enabling Front Page access to employees of One Choice who acted as content maintainers for the site. As a result, One Choice was hosting its own Web site in-house at a cost savings of over $200.00 per year without implementing any additional hardware. The investigation and diagnosis of Studio 3xd uncovered the critical nature of the state of the domain. As a result, the potential crash and loss of the entire domain was exposed and plans were made to provide a solution to correct the domain corruption and avoiding immeasurable downtime, frustration and rebuilding costs.
Phase 3 – Rebuild of Active Directory infrastructure
Planning
The final phase was the most complex. Studio 3xd was commissioned to do a complete rebuild of the One Choice Mortgage network to remove any corruption that existed previously, yet maintain the exact functionality and configuration that was previously set up. Studio 3xd began the project three weeks prior to setting foot on-site by planning the approach and consulting with the client on what information would need to be gathered and available for the deployment. Additionally, the customer requested additional enhancements and hardware to be implemented. All of these issues were factored into the project to determine the scope and avoid any scope creep that had been encountered in previous phases.
Execution
Once the planning was complete and both parties were confident in the project's goals and deliverables, a date was planned. The project was projected to take a total of 47 hours over one weekend from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon. The Studio 3xd team arrived to distribute documentation that was required for a checklist of pre and post domain migration procedures that had to be precisely carried out for each step of the project.
The Infrastructure Lead created a domain on a migration machine that Studio 3xd provided and migrated the domain information from the old domain to its temporary home on the migration machine. At the same time, the Project Manager and Hardware Lead went to work prepping the client computers for their new profiles once the domain had been re-created.
The domain was then set up on the newly converted workstation machine intended to act as domain controller. The Active Directory information was migrated to the new domain controller and all the user accounts were intact.
New profiles were then created on all of the workstations and the e-mail was imported into Outlook. All My Documents folders were previously managed on the file server so no documents required importing. Additionally, roaming profiles were established during this project which provided users the flexibility to take their entire profile from machine to machine if necessary.
A thorough testing plan was implemented to check for all major and minor functional requirements of the project. The testing showed a few minor issues that were quickly resolved by the team. The following Monday, the Studio 3xd Project Manager was on-site to assist in resolving any major issues that were not encountered until business hours.
About Studio 3xd Corp.
Studio 3xd Corp. is a full service IT consulting company specializing in web design, hosting and Network consultation. Studio 3xd provides local networking services to the greater Chicago, IL and Milwaukee, WI areas.
Find out more
To learn more about how Studio 3xd can help your small or medium sized business create a new Web site, leverage the power of the internet and manage your own local network, contact us today: