Case Study Active Directory clean-up & Server Upgrade

The Client

The Institute of Public Care (IPC) is one of Britain's leading knowledge transfer organisations, working across primary care, education, social care and supported housing. A centre of Oxford Brookes University, its purpose is to enhance the quality and effectiveness of care and welfare services.
IPC's clients include central and local government, NHS organisations, and the private and voluntary sectors. Its projects range from work with children's services through CAMHS, learning disability, mental health services, youth justice, substance misuse services and older people.

The Challenge

IPC were using two Windows 2003 based servers with one located at their Bath and Oxford offices with an encrypted VPN connection between the two sites with files synchronised nightly across the link.
Many of the users also connected into the network using VPNs allowing them to work remotely. While this worked well, it often required IPC to replace users’ home routers and sometimes even internet connection due to compatibility problems.
Westgate was tasked with overhauling everything while providing a seamless transfer with minimum disruption to users.

Business Solution

After being contacted by IPC, Westgate surveyed the current setup and quickly put together a project plan for upgrading the servers and remote access solution. After discussing the plan, IPC approved and Westgate started putting it into action. The first step was to create a new domain and configure the two new servers to run in parallel without disrupting the current system. This then gave us the ability to transfer at a pace that allowed us an IPC to thoroughly test things before deploying live to users.
After all machines were switched over to the new domain and everything was confirmed working, Westgate rebuilt the old servers as backup servers to make full use of the hardware. New routers were also installed which simplified things and eliminated the compatibility problems with the old ones.

Outcome

Westgate co-ordinated with IPC to minimize downtime throughout which meant that other than scheduled changeovers, users were barely aware of the switch.