Novell NDS migration and Quest

I went to a presentation on Friday by Quest Software on their Novell migration tools (NDS Migrator) which I enjoyed because it was given by a techie who knew his stuff and just demoed the tools. Excellent! I had two main thoughts about the whole NDS migration area:

Firstly whilst the tools did a great job doing the actual migration there was a whole load of pre planning which had to go on around it which was probably more challenging. During this you will need to determine which tools are the most appropriate (manual, SFN, or Migrator) and then a complete project timeline and actions. There is an excellent planning guide which covers the technical aspects of migration but there are still a lot of project and people issues which need to be addressed. Incidentally whilst reading the guide it occurred to me that the actual detailed steps would be ideal for a blogcast to make the whole thing more understandable, a sort of blogproject! Actually talking about project management reminds me of a training video on an office move with John Cleese in it that I saw about 15 years ago which was absolute hilarious and very accurate.

Secondly the key moment is when the user switches over to AD from NDS. Whilst it would be nice if this could all happen at once fact of life is that planned that way. Ideally there should be a (web) portal which the user goes to with all the information they need, the script start points, FAQ and help information. Quest has the bones of this but it would be great to have a templated version.

Anyway an interesting session. If you are interested in NDS migration we will be running an NDS interop and migration session at Reading on the 29th of March where Quest has agreed to talk. Do come along.