Building an Active Directory forest for a tenant to tenant migration

ADAC Hansa e.V. was looking for an experienced partner to assist with the tenant-to-tenant migration to its own Microsoft 365 tenant. Working with novaCapta, the organisation successfully completed the technical separation from its Munich site. To manage the new Windows-based networks, ADAC Hansa e.V. now benefits from Microsoft’s Active Directory (AD) directory service.

Technological separation from the location in Munich  

Migration to a separate Microsoft 365 tenant (incl. Exchange migration – all mailboxes and public folders)  

Active Directory carve-out  

Large number of various software manufacturers within the application landscape  

Setting up a directory service with Microsoft Active Directory   

Synchronization of AD objects in the target forest    

1:1 migration for uninterrupted business operations during the IT project  

During the project: Service Desk available in Jira  

Independent administration of the systems  

Progressive digitalization of the club  

Newly gained flexibility to meet demands for own and cross-regional projects  

ADAC Hansa e.V. is one of 18 regional clubs of ADAC. Like half of the regional clubs, ADAC Hansa was integrated into the IT landscape of the ADAC headquarters in Munich. To be able to act more flexible in the future and to better meet the requirements of its own as well as cross-regional projects, ADAC Hansa intended to

separate itself from this infrastructure. In this way, the association also complies with the request of the headquarters to manage itself as an independent regional club in the future.  

ADAC Hansa relies on the Microsoft directory service Active Directory (AD) as one of the central components for managing the Windows-based networks. The AD maps the organizational structure of the association and, in preparation for the tenant migration, required a new organizational level above the domains, a so-called AD forest. Together with novaCapta, the appropriate structure for the forest was defined and implemented. The various devices and resources in the association's network, including their attributes, were saved in the new directory. This allows administrators to enable or disable individual devices and network resources depending on the user. Other resources, that can be administered, include storage space, access rights to directories and usage rights for applications. 

With the help of domain controllers, users are always authenticated and assigned the intended roles. "The Active Directory not only enables us to manage access rights and policies centrally, but above all to ensure a high level of information security. We operate two domain controllers in parallel, which store all information redundantly. This ensures that network operations can be maintained even if one server fails," Hans Peter Hansen, Head of IT & Telecommunications at ADAC Hansa, is convinced. Clients were integrated into the new network via a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) without manual configuration of the network interface. Necessary information such as IP address, netmask, gateway, name server (DNS) and other settings were automatically assigned. 

"In order to ensure that all necessary data was included in the migration, novaCapta was interested in how the source environment had been used up to that point. The guiding principle of the carve-out was to maintain the current status quo in terms of content in the new environment and to synchronize existing AD objects in the target forest. We then planned the individual migration steps together. This way, we could be sure that the appropriate tools would be used, and that the migration would fit our individual requirements. The actual migration was completed within one week and even without restricting the activities of the sales department! They were able to look after our customers and members as usual," says Hansen about the joint project procedure. Parallel to the technical implementation, the focus was on the employees, who received the necessary support during the data migration.  

With the tenant to tenant migration, ADAC Hansa succeeded in building its own IT infrastructure and overcoming the biggest hurdle towards self-administration. "We see the greatest benefits of the IT project in the advanced digitalization of the club. Now it is time to learn about digital collaboration with our new tenant in Microsoft Teams," Hansen said confidently. As far as further IT security is concerned, the next step is to set up and coordinate the interaction of Microsoft Endpoint Manager, conditional access, and multi-factor authentication.  

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