Title: Message
Nef,
I
won't hold punches on this answer.
Get a
plan in place, and Microsoft Operations Framework is about as good as any.
As Marc says - there are a number of good 'best practice' studies, white papers,
etc to guide you. Given that I'm at the tale end of a 3 year process (not
all due to the migration, but due partly to a schema corruption from a 3rd party
piece) I'm very familiar with what you're going to go
through.
Also,
I typically was paid quite well to design and implement plans to do this, I'm
not going to outline it here. But, I will tell you that you had better
ramp up on support staff, or at least plan appropriately. An old addage
for a 'consultants rule of thumb' (for both time and money) is to plan what it
will take to do it - double it - then add another 50%.
Your
user community is the reason that you need to plan this right. During the
time that you are in a split environment, your administrative duties, per
person, is going to about double. Factor into that you may be one ot two
people short - someone has to be migrating. If your environment is like
most - migrations will be done at night so that the user impact is
minimized. That means that at least one person will not even be available
for some months.
If I
can advise one thing - get you consolidation done. Reduce the number of NT
4.0 domains down to an absolute minimum. Upgrade as many NT 4.0 member
servers to Win2k as possible. Oh - and you will be much happier with the
ultimate outcome if you create a pristine Windows 2000 forest and migrate the
users, computers, groups into the new forest. Resolves a lot of issues,
lets you get your environment in place, tested, and stable before the users and
data starts moving over.
Just
keep your head down and keep plugging along.
Hope
this helps.....
Rick Kingslan MCSE, MCSA, MCT
Microsoft MVP - Active
Directory
Associate Expert
Expert Zone -
www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone
We are in the process of planning our migration to
ADS from 90 NT 4 domains that are used for authentication within the company
into a single forest with one domain. Some of these NT domains contain
upwards of 3K to 4K user accounts and untold number of groups that will need
to be migrated over a period of time. A concern that we have is with the
level of complexity and administrative overhead that our support organizations
will experience in managing partially migrated domains, especially groups
which are in some instances managed actively by the hour, over a period of
time that can extend up to six or eight weeks.
Your assistance is appreciated in directing me to
any best practices that address this issue or any personal experiences that
you've had with this situation.
Nef
