Riordan Active Directory Implementation Plan

The Riordan Manufacturing Company is a global company with one location in China, and three locations in the U.S.A., which are located in Pontiac, Michigan; San Jose, California, and Albany, Georgia. The corporate office is located in San Jose, California. This location has decided to upgrade their computer systems, which is now using Windows NT 4.0. This report is to make recommendations of what OS the company should upgrade to; what the benefits would be, and how to implement a plan of action.

Changing the network structure from Windows NT 4.0 to Windows Server 2008 will allow the Administrator of the Network to use Active Directory which uses profile templates. The template allows the profiles for user groups and individual users to be set up in templates so that they do not have to be replicated over and over again. The Active Directory also allows for nesting which can be used locally on the local domain servers as well as globally across multiple domain servers. There is no need to restructure for each user or group. Each user or group can have a template set up for printing locally and globally. Security and permissions can be set in the template and users can be added and deleted as needed without restructuring. Windows Server 2008 has the most recent security features so would be a good choice for upgrading. By nesting the corporate domain with the local domains, and using the Active Directory templates for user and group profiles the administrator only needs to structure the profile template once, and then just add and delete users and groups as needed. This allows management of permissions and network resources as well.