Background
Last year ODU made a strategic decision regarding our home and shared file system, our printing infrastructure, our desktop management tools and our service authentication infrastructure. We have relied on a Novell NetWare\eDirectory infrastructure for at least 13 years, and we have taken advantage of a robust, reliable and secure file, print and authentication environment. However, due to some limitations or obstacles to integration with Windows products, a changing institutional focus and other technical considerations, the determination has been made that the time is right, and it will be in the long-term interest of ODU, to move our file, print and authentication infrastructure to a Windows AD model. We are moving to Windows File, Print and authentication services, and LANDesk application and desktop management suite. This will replace our NetWare file and print system, and ZENWorks Desktop Management.
OCCS is building the next generation infrastructures to support ODU’s desktop, file systemand authentication needs. The changes are intended to put us in a position to provide greater functionality to our user community and greater flexibility in the administration of these systems.
What do these changes mean to you in the long term?
Collaboration tools will become available for sharing data within ODU as well as with other organizations.
Greater security models for laptops and desktops to meet the growing needs for mobility as well as the growing threats to data integrity – such as two-factor authentication and disk encryption.
Data lifecycle management will be developed, which will increase our flexibility in managing and allocating space.
Greater Macintosh support for file, print and desktop management functions will be available.
Increased integration with Microsoft applications, such as Outlook, will become available.
What do these changes mean to you in the short term?
Over the coming weeks, OCCS will be completing a pilot of the new environment. This pilot includes several Technical Support Providers from around the campus, some users of our Administrative System and several engineers within OCCS. On May 11th, our labs and student accounts will begin using the new systems. In mid-May OCCS will begin using the new systems, and by June we will begin scheduling to move Administrative Departments to the new systems. Since the migration requires users to login, we will begin scheduling Colleges early in the Fall Semester.
While these changes involve the very core of our desktop and file system environment, we are working to make the transition minimally invasive to users. We are developing a migration strategy which is non-destructive to our current environment while we add components of the new environment. The current migration plan includes four phases which we will coordinate with Departments and Colleges.
Phase I – Move home directories, some shared directories and networked printers to the new system. This will require a brief down period while we move data, and will require users to follow login instructions to access the data in the new location. Drive mappings and user experience should remain fairly consistent. Instructions for this migration can be found here.
Phase II – Move desktop applications and desktop management functions to the new LANDesk Desktop Management environment.
Phase III – Moving the remaining shared data, such as the I: drive, to the new file system. This should be transparent to users, and will be completed after all departments and colleges have been migrated to the new file and print infrastructure.
Phase IV – Remove any remaining dependencies on the legacy system, and remove the Novell client from the desktop. We hope to be completely off the legacy system by early 2010.
If you feel that your department of college would benefit from a meeting, please let me know. If you have any questions regarding the migration, I would be glad to meet with you or answer via email at ADMigration@list.odu.edu. We want to meet every question or concern, and make this migration as seamless as possible for everyone.