Since the start of this millennium there have been two major active directories on campus. Most UW academic users used some services (www.eng, engmail, etc.) and about 4,000 workstations in all faculties delivered by nexus, and on the other hand, all of campus used some services (Quest, UW-Ace, JobMine, etc.) and about 2,000 administration workstations delivered by ADS.
Nexus was started by Engineering Computing and shared among the faculties (and IST managed podiums). ADS was administered by IST. There were benefits of each, but it also left some confusion among users about which was which.
An executive committee decided the campus would benefit from the merger of the two systems into nexus administered by IST.
A consolidation committee was struck. In March 2011, I was asked to lead the integration of the two domains – a formidable task. It was imperative that we accomplish a merger of the two systems, but also with the least possible downtime or inconvenience to our users. Furthermore, I wanted to make some design changes which would pick the best of each domain, and also reflect insights learned over the last decade.
I started a very infrequently updated blog (
http://ad-consolidation.uwaterloo.ca) which gives updates on the project. Most of the pieces are now falling into place, and the big showy parts are left: moving ADS workstations to nexus and moving database/applications like Quest, Desire2Learn, JobMine, etc. While this sounds like most of the heavy lifting is ahead, most of the difficult challenges were actually in the earlier stages preparing to get to this point.
The first evidence of the merger was that new students for the Fall 2011 term all had their accounts created well in advance. In previous years we could not create accounts until the students had registered for courses and paid their fees in full. By late January, we expect creation of student , faculty and staff accounts will probably automatically from feeds in Quest, Human Resources, etc.
Other campus services will migrate to nexus starting in late January. Notification will be given in the Daily Bulletin, but for most users the change will be seamless because we have already synchronized passwords between the two domains and they would not know or care if the password is being checked by ADS or nexus.
The exact timetable of web applications conversion will depend on complexity (many will be easy, some not easy) and also significant dates when we cannot afford changes, like fiscal year end.
I predict the complete conversion will take another year, but the big web servers and databases will likely be done well before that. Students who arrive in September 2012 will likely never know that there had ever been a divide or two passwords to get at your data.
