No more hiding in the server room
How Best to Handle an Acquisition?
Hello,
Our company has recently purchased a smaller company, and I am about to begin the process of assessing their current IT infrastructure, to see how best to intergrate it with ours.
I have been told by management that the acquired company must continue to operate under its own name, and hence email addresses must remain unchanged. They must however be brought into our domain.
We are a Windows Server 2003 / Win XP environment, with VMWare ESX 3.5 virtualised servers, and use Citrix for publishing apps.
My initial questions are -
- What is the best way to introduce an acquired company into your existing domain?
- Is it possible to introduce a child domain which does not contain the same domain extension? eg parent = @parentcompany.com.au, new child domain = @abc.com.au
Thanks - Wayne
Our company has recently purchased a smaller company, and I am about to begin the process of assessing their current IT infrastructure, to see how best to intergrate it with ours.
I have been told by management that the acquired company must continue to operate under its own name, and hence email addresses must remain unchanged. They must however be brought into our domain.
We are a Windows Server 2003 / Win XP environment, with VMWare ESX 3.5 virtualised servers, and use Citrix for publishing apps.
My initial questions are -
- What is the best way to introduce an acquired company into your existing domain?
- Is it possible to introduce a child domain which does not contain the same domain extension? eg parent = @parentcompany.com.au, new child domain = @abc.com.au
Thanks - Wayne
Views: 69
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Paul Rouse on -
To integrate them into your existing domain you will have to perform an Cross Forest AD Migration.
These links should help
ADMT v3.1 Guide: Migrating and Restructuring Active Directory Domains:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc974332.aspx
Download ADMT v3
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=6F86937B-5...
ADMT v3 Migration Guide
]http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=D99EF770-3...
Interforest AD Domain Restructure
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc974335.aspx
Ive gone through a few AD migrations and I have one major recommendation - PLAN PLAN PLAN. I found that mailbox migration is generally the thing that takes the most time - how many users are you going to have to migrate and how big are their mailboxes?
Paul
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Permalink Reply by Wayne Neilson on -
Thanks Paul,
This is a wealth of information and will well and truly get me started.
I will invest as much time as I can in planning.
I am visiting the new acquisition on Tuesday for an environment assessment, and will more details about user numbers, mailbox numbers, etc after that.
Thanks again, I really appreciate your time and expertise.
Regards - Wayne
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Permalink Reply by Sitaram Pamarthi on -
>I have been told by management that the acquired company must continue to operate under its own name
Does it mean that they should continue in the same domain where they are living already? If yes, cross forest trust-relationship should be established to allow the resource sharing across your domain and the company you acquired. Also, I would recommend you do the following.
1. First sit with the other company(I will call it as A) IT group and understand how their infrastructure is
2. Check and identify the technologies which can be replaced in A with the technologies you have.
3. Check for services integration like, LCS where you both companies can IM with each other
4. Also you can look at the federation.
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Permalink Reply by Wayne Neilson on
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Thanks Sitaram,
This information will help me get started with accurate and focussed planning.
I am visiting the new acquisition on Tuesday for an environment assessment, and will have more details about user numbers, mailbox numbers, etc after that.
Thanks again, I really appreciate your time and expertise.
Regards - Wayne
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Permalink Reply by Sitaram Pamarthi on
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I just want to mention one more thing that, even though you moved all the company A users to into your AD infrastructure, you can still make them to continue with their old email IDs. Just thought of letting you know about this as well. I will post more if I recollect.
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Permalink Reply by Wayne Neilson on
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Thanks Sitaram,
I am very interested to find out more about how to allow the Company A users to still retain their old email addresses after moving them into our AD structure.
Regards - Wayne
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Permalink Reply by Sitaram Pamarthi on
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To answer this. I want to know little bit your external email infrastructure. I hope I can provide you a good solution for this.
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Permalink Reply by Cat on -
A quick and dirty way of integrating new users without losing their email addresses, especially with customers, is to attach more SMTP addresses to their AD/email account. I've been through >10 acquisitions (us buying them) and this is how we handled the transition while sales and support people notified their customers of the change and got new buisness cards.
Some users had been through a few acquisitions previously and had 6 or more SMTP addresses, so it's a really good idea to get a commitment from upper managment that there will be a definite timeline on how long you'll keep the old addresses around. Otherwise, maintenance can be a nightmare and management will never get the company "branding" that they will want.
PS, the Quest tools are a godsend for merging multiple domains. They make moving accounts, mailboxes, clients and servers a dream.
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Permalink Reply by Wayne Neilson on
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Hi Cat,
Thanks for your reply.
Can you send me the link to the Quest tools please?
Our company has Exchange 2007 implemented, with two front end Exch 2007 Std Ed Client Access / Hub Transport server, and two back end Exch 2007 Ent Ed clustered mailbox servers (active / passive). Email traffic goes via our ISA 2006 Server and then out to the web.
We have approx 400 mailboxes.
The company acquired runs Small Business Server 2003 on a single server, and uses its inbuilt Exchange 2003 component for email. They have a direct link through a firewalled router to the web.
Each company has its own domain name, and hence emails addresses.
So I need to transfer the acquired company's mailboxes into our environment, and maintain their email addresses. How will emails sent to their email addresses know how to route to our company domain?
Cheers - Wayne
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Permalink Reply by Wayne Neilson on
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Hi Sitaram,
Our company has Exchange 2007 implemented, with two front end Exch 2007 Std Ed Client Access / Hub Transport server, and two back end Exch 2007 Ent Ed clustered mailbox servers (active / passive). Email traffic goes via our ISA 2006 Server and then out to the web.
We have approx 400 mailboxes.
The company acquired runs Small Business Server 2003 on a single server, and uses its inbuilt Exchange 2003 component for email. They have a direct link through a firewalled router to the web.
Each company has its own domain name, and hence emails addresses.
So I need to transfer the acquired company's mailboxes into our environment, and maintain their email addresses. How will emails sent to their email addresses know how to route to our company domain?
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Permalink Reply by Sitaram Pamarthi on
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Okay. I think you can do this way.
Assume abc.com is your domain and xyz.com is domain of company you acquired.
If you ready to move users to your abc.com domain from xyz.com domain, then move the mailbox, configure a separate recipient policy for these moved users to create SMTP address as user@xyz.com. Then check with xyz.com DNS admin(or concerned) and move MX records of XYZ.com to your gateway servers. After this, any mail sent from internet to xyz.com will reach your gateway and it will process the emails. This is very easy operation to do, I will check and append if I find any useful documentation or I will write one for you :-)
Let me know if I am not clear to you
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