A Technology Upgrade

Feels like a good time to update everyone on the major technology upgrade we are undergoing at work --

We have spent this week adding user to the new Domain while continuing to keep them part of the Novell Network. To accomplish this, users needed to login to the domain using their old account for NDS while also logging into AD with their new account. In addition to that, we needed to copy their old Windows local account to their new AD account so they wouldn't lose all their settings. Supposedly a product called NDS Migrator was supposed to make this task simple. Well, it did when it worked, which was less than 50% of the time. In the end, we ended up manually copying and joining computers to the domain which took some time.

On Wednesday, I traveled to Wheeling at 8:00 a.m. and worked their until 5:00 p.m. and then drove to Martinsburg, arriving there at 9:00 p.m. Worked in that office until midnight and went to the hotel. Traveled back into Martinsburg Thursday morning to finish moving user acounts and then traveled back to Clarksburg on Thursday afternoon. I then proceeded to work the grave shift overnight from Thursday to Friday morning and finally got home this morning at 9:00 a.m. That's a long day...

Beginning Thursday we also began our Document Management System consolidation. So, basically we're taking 6 libraries of documents and consolidating them into 1 massive collection. Over 3 million documents were copied from the various libraries, renumbered, reprofiled and loaded into the new DMS. As I said, I worked overnight Thursday working on this and got about one-third of the way through. Sixteen PCs were setup in an office to perform the consolidation. I took a picture of the room, which was impressive, but I forgot the camera at the office. I'll get them on here Monday or Tuesday. The second shift is now working on this project and we're over 50% of the way complete on the DocsOpen consolidation.

The side effect of the Docs consolidation is that documents will be unavailable in all offices until the consolidation is finished sometime on Saturday. We have been sending notices of this fact since last Friday. And, of course, what do you think the calls were about this morning? Where are my documents? Oh, I didn't read that e-mail but I need my documents! People pay no attention to the announcements we make and they wonder why IT can be irritated. For over a week we have warned that documents would NOT be available beginning Thursday night but our users chose to ignore our warnings. But, regardless, the process must continue.

This is really a major milestone in moving forward. Once the consolidation is done, we will finalize a final DMS client for our PCs and update our Vista image with the new client. After that, we will patch Vista and Office 2007 and begin distributing test machines for an IT Proof of Concept beginning the week of January 28. Final POC testing on February 4th and we'll actually begin user testing on the week of February 11. If we can proceed without any additional issues, we will beging rolling out new Vista workstations with Office 2007 by March. Several months behind schedule but at least it should work. If not, I may be looking for other employment...