The Customer
Dulwich College is one of the most prestigious private schools in U.K., which was founded in 1619. Dulwich become the first British private school to establish an overseas campus in 1996. In 2003, Dulwich College Shanghai was opened. Currently Dulwich have 8 schools established in Asia, with more than 9000 students and thousands of staffs and teachers working together.
The Challenge
In the last 15 years, new Dulwich schools was established gradually in different cities, together with their own IT system, both on-premises and cloud, initiated independently. With the growth of organization’s size, communication and cooperation between schools become more and more frequent, lead to the requirement of students and staffs accessing IT resources from other schools. Creating guest accounts could be a temporary mitigation for such cases, yet this could increase the cost of system management, and not promising for cyber security and brand cohesion in long term. Dulwich urgently need a reunification.
The Solution
The target of bringing all Dulwich schools together is to built unified IT system for the organization, which would starting from the planning of Active Directory architecture, with service deployment, account/data migration, desktop migration and tenant switch come after.
For the convenience of account permission assignment and management, the Active Directory was deployed in the structure of parent-child domains, which gives the school IT admins enough permission to manage student and staff accounts while still under the full coverage of the global office.
For the migration, to cut down the influence on experience, data need to be prepared and cleansed in advance, and create the account mapping for one-to-one migration. Devices would need to be switched to the new domain as well, causing new user profile being created locally. To improve the desktop user’s experience, data would also need to be migrated to the new profiles. All these works can only be accomplished efficiently with proper tools and solutions.
The Result
With delicate planning and deployment, all Dulwich schools have now been merged into one unified Active Directory and Microsoft 365 tenant, saving IT admins tedious tasks of managing permissions for accounts, enhancing the communication for the cohesive network of the organization, and significantly reduce the cost. During the whole process, all necessary data in mailboxes, OneDrive and SharePoint were migrated smoothly, bringing staff, teachers and staff seamless experience.
Success of the whole project centralized the management and accessibility of IT system, and achieved the goal of “One Dulwich” concept.