Changes to Network Login, File Servers & Sharing Coming This Summer/Fall

While mostly invisible to end users except for the initial log-on screen on university computers, Novell has been an important part of Miami’s network environment to date. Recent changes in the overall network infrastructure mean Miami now has other alternatives for functions historically served by Novell. These functions include items like network login, network file/folder rights assignment, and network printer queues. To streamline the network environment and reduce costs, the university will be moving away from Novell to a Windows environment during the remainder of this calendar year.

Project work is well underway. The storage hardware needed for migrating files to the Windows environment arrived in mid-April. The team is busy building the production server environment, including Window servers to be used for file sharing as well as servers to be used for web access, secure file transfer, and data migration. This work is slated to be completed on April 30th, allowing for the production environment to be tested as a whole.

The project team will be working with departmental representatives throughout the university to schedule migration dates for each area in the June 15 to December 31 timeframe. As is typical for the implementation of new services, IT Services will be the first department to migrate files to the new environment in order to ensure all is working smoothly. The IT Services migration is slated for May 22. 

From an end user perspective, this migration will change fairly little about how you interact with the network. If you have not already moved to Active Directory for your computer login, you’ll see a slightly different login screen. The goal is to have automated tools take care of adjusting your drive mapping and printer settings, but some manual intervention may be required.  If so, detailed instructions will be provided.

More information will be shared via the e-Report and departmental representatives as migrations near. Please feel free to contact the project manager, Carrie Ledford, at ledforch@muohio.edu if you have questions about this project.