Domain Migration

Background: A big merge and acquisition event took place in Jul-Aug 2010 the period I was with Molecular Device. Molecular was taken over by a giant manufacturer company called Danaher. And for better managing corporation infrastructure, resources and to keep the company running on the same pace, it was decided to migrate to a new domain.

Target: The target was to

1. Migrate from Molecular Domain to Danaher Domain so the computer, account info and other resources could be managed by new AD. This requires actions taken from server side and

2. Corp email account should also migrate to new mail mail server and outlook should be able to access history data.

3. Other software should work as well etc.

Solution: 1. Download user decryption certificate from CA server and decrypt all local data of user profile. 

2. Login as administrator and use script to migrate to new domain 

3. User login to change outlook server using script; Mount the historical email data .pst file. 

4. Test usability and other software. 

Major Achievement:

Technology Used:

Difficulties Concurred:

Challenges: Project deadline against the workload without compromise regular operations; 

Man power; 

Unpredicted conditions like encryption; 

user profile is encrypted and it has to be decrypted before the migration.

Lessons Learnt: Historical user data backup on server side based on individual requirements. Exchange server/IMAP account instead of pop3 account to save data on server side.