Avoid planetary disasters – Quickly bridge two organizations
What happens when two organizations decide to merge or when a larger enterprise envelopes a smaller organization? Without a plan in place for an effective integration, the two organization are bound for disaster from an IT perspective. Much like two planetary objects colliding in space.
It can be a daunting task to consider the amount of work required to integrate disparate directories. During a transition phase there can be many stumbling blocks and hurdles to overcome to ensure that the ongoing business is impacted the least and allows for the communication between the various teams to be realized.
Having consulted with a number of organizations going through the process of a difficult merger, we have come up with some best practices and an approach to quickly bridge the gap while your long-term integration plans are worked out.
- Establish a team project manager who can be the liaison between both existing IT parties. This is perhaps the person who will ultimately be the primary manager of messaging and/or security infrastructure in the final combined organization.
- Decide on common naming conventions for job title, departments, cities, and other geographic descriptions. This is an important element when you want to intelligently map out the organization in the future. This is perhaps the most painful process of the entire project because it requires some changes and the first time two potentially very different implementations come into one another.
- Leveraging software tools such as Imanami’s GroupID Synchronize, map out your naming convention rules across both organizations. Simple mapping capabilities to convert “Mgr” to “Manager” and “SF” to “San Francisco” will be critical to the future success of a blended directory.
- With the implementation of a two-way synchronization to publish remote forest objects as contact objects and the reverse, bring the two organizations together virtually. With the push/pull capability of GroupID Synchronize, each user in a forest will see objects exposed into your GAL.
- Finally create DL SmartGroups with Imanami’s GroupID Automate that include both user objects and contacts leveraging common AD attribute conventions. With minimal effort, you will be able to clone/copy the ldap query logic between sites that make up the SmartGroup.
You can then be the interstellar super star who had the brilliant plan in place that allowed very different organizations to come together quickly ensuring ongoing productivity. Perhaps the newly minted harmonious binary system you helped build will be named after you? Probably not, but at least you will be able to watch your two heavenly objects harmoniously orbit each other.
Jonathan Blackwell
View ProfileSince 2012, Jonathan Blackwell, an engineer and innovator, has provided engineering leadership that has put GroupID at the forefront of group and user management for Active Directory and Azure AD environments. His experience in development, marketing, and sales allows Jonathan to fully understand the Identity market and how buyers think.