JDA—Methodologies

ACTIVE DIRECTORY SERVICES

John Drake & Associates is a high-end network services consulting firm specializing in providing seamless design, integration management, support, and operation of our client's communication and data networks. Our network services consultants are seasoned professionals with over ten years of experience providing high-quality, technology solutions to Fortune 1000 and other industry leading organizations. Utilizing our proven "Strategy First" approach and "4 Steps to Success" delivery methodology, JDA excels at understanding an organization's objectives, developing the right technology solution to meet them, and then delivering successfully—the first time.

Our Delivery Methodology

While JDA leads with strategy, delivery is equally critical. For the last six years and over hundreds of projects, our network services team has developed, refined, and tweaked "4 Steps to Success," the methodology we use today to deliver all of our engagements.

JDA’s "4 Steps to Success"

1. Discover: This is the initial phase of the engagement and represents our data-gathering activities. JDA will gather network schematics, relevant documentation, and take extensive notes during walkthroughs, meetings, and interviews with key personnel.

2. Design: In this phase, the information gathered undergoes intensive scrubbing and analysis. During an engagement, resources from many technology areas within JDA, such as infrastructure, directory services, and security, are involved in the solution design. Other activities during this phase typically include proof-of-concept testing.

3. Implement: This is the execution phase, where everything comes together in production. Our project team carries out the project plan developed during the Design phase, while our Project Manager closely monitors project activities, budget, change management, and timelines.

4. Maintain: Depending upon the engagement, once the Implement phase is complete, we may enter the Maintain phase, where we will provide IT staff and end-user training or ongoing administration and support to the client.

Active Directory (AD)

JDA’s approach to the design and deployment of Microsoft’s Active Directory (AD) remains true to our core philosophies. To architect a truly customized solution, one must understand the business requirements driving any technology solution. Our approach is a marriage of Microsoft and JDA best-practices, while leveraging JDA's extensive experience across numerous clients and vertical markets. The following is our approach to designing Active Directory solutions (represented below in JDA's "4 Steps to Success" color-scheme) to our overall delivery methodology.

Determine Design Requirements

•  Logical Structure Design: Determines how your directory objects are organized, and provides an effective strategy for managing your network accounts and shared resources.

•  Site Topology Design: The site topology represents a logical view of the physical network. It contains information about the location of sites, domain controllers within each site, and the site links that support replication between sites.

•  Domain Controller (DC) Capacity Planning: Determining the appropriate number of domain controllers for each site is critical to ensuring a proper level of performance.

•  Advanced AD Features: Depending upon the design, you may choose to take advantage of features such as improved group membership replication, deactivation and redefinition of attributes and classes in the schema, and forest trust relationships.

Determine Deployment Requirements

•  Forest Root: In deploying AD, you must first deploy a forest root domain. This involves DNS configuration, deployment of forest root domain controllers, configuring the topology for the forest root domain, and configuring operations master roles.

•  Regional Domains: If regional domains are being utilized, they should be deployed subsequent to the forest root domain.

•  Novell Directory Services (NDS) to AD: Native or third-party tools exist to provide seamless migration of user accounts, data, and security controls. Proper strategy and experience is critical for success.

•  Windows NT 4.0 Domain Upgrade: An in-place domain upgrade of NT 4.0 allows you to use AD without making any modifications to your existing domain structure.

Determine Restructure Requirements

•  Novell Directory Services to AD Forest: In most cases, a parallel environment is required throughout the migration. Strategies can be employed for object synchronization and single point of administration.

•  NT4 Domain to AD Forest: Due to its greater scalability, an AD environment requires fewer domains than a Windows NT 4.0 environment, offering consolidation opportunities.

•  Interforest AD Domain: Restructuring domains between forests allows a reduction in the number of domains within the environment, reducing administrative complexity and overhead.

•  Intraforest AD Domain: Restructuring domains within a forest allows consolidation of the domain structure, thereby reducing administrative complexity and overhead.

Validation and Execution

Proper testing via proof-of-concept and pilot techniques is critical to the successful deployment of your newly-designed, Active Directory environment. To further leverage your investment, that same lab environment can also serve as a staging platform within your deployment strategy.

Click here for a .pdf of JDA's methodologies.