OIT plans to begin migrating Windows-based Unity Lab computers from Novell to Active Directory this Fall Semester. In March of 2009, the Active Directory Working Group made the decision to go with WolfTech as the central Active Directory Environment for campus. OIT will begin with a pilot evaluation starting August 10th. The labs that will be included in the pilot are Sullivan, Honors Village, and First Year Commons. We will then address issues discovered in the pilot and migrate the rest of the labs by October 8, 2009.

In the new environment, roaming profiles will not be supported. Applications will be delivered to workstations via group policies. This means that applications must be packaged as msi files. Since Mozilla’s Thunderbird application cannot be easily packaged as an msi it will not be delivered in the Unity Labs. Current college labs that are already migrated to Active Directory do not have Thunderbird loaded on their systems.

For users in OIT’s Active Directory Environment, they will need to use a web-based email client (email, gwweb). Users will continue to use AFS as their ‘My Documents’ volume until the campus File Services Committee chooses a new solution and it has been tested and deployed. OIT’s default image for the Unity Labs will contain only the Windows XP operating system and Microsoft Office 2007. All other applications will be delivered via group policies. OIT plans on leveraging the centralized campus Windows Deployment Service (WDS) to image workstations.

OIT will no longer package new applications for the Novell Academic Environment after January 11, 2010. However, OIT will continue to support the Novell Academic Environment until September 1, 2010. Those that need help migrating to the Active Directory Environment can send a request to help@ncsu.edu. Also we encourage support staff to subscribe to the wolftech-ad email list.