Merge Subsidiary Business IT

Customer

The customer employs over 83,000 people worldwide in locations that include Australia, Africa, the U.K., Asia and the Middle East. They deliver a wide range of services through their Upstream, Downstream, Technology, Services, Government and Infrastructure, and Ventures business segments, and differentiate themselves as a technology-driven engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) company.

Requirement

The customer had a requirement to incorporate a 3000 seat subsidiary business into their global IT standard systems. The customer needed be able to deploy a standard desktop environment to all users with every system having a unique configuration based on the individual user's requirements. At the same time all the user ID's had to be changed to bring them into line with the customer's global IT standards. This had to be done with no requirement for the systems to undergo any configuration once the transition was complete.

Solution

It was apparent that as every system on every desk was to be replaced with new hardware but due to the client base size, having the systems preconfigured for each user's exact requirement, then deploying the right hardware to the right user would incur a massive logistical cost, as well as a massive cost initially configuring each system. As such Springmark devised a process to automate the configuration of each system to the requirements of the user for that system, once the systems had been deployed to the user's desks.

As within many large corporation the physical asset tag for each system included a bar code, and this asset tag was used to form the variable in the systems host name, Springmark was able to write custom scripts that utilised information gathered via hand held bar code reading Window Mobile devices to pin-point which of the 3000 systems was on each user's desk. These custom scripts configured every aspect of each system for the intended user, from installing the application portfolio specific to each user, right down to installing the user's printers and everything in-between.

While this process was underway the entire users network stored data, based around the users ID, was migrated to fall into line with the customers global IT standards and the new user ID's. To minimise issues post migration, users existing passwords where migrated from the old domain to the global domain and the users systems had the users new user ID pre-populated at login. All the user had to do was type their pre-transition password as normal on the new systems and they were up and running straight away.