Windows 2003 Active Directory Planning and Design

CCO was one of a handful of organizations on the Windows 2003 Joint Development Program (JDP) that helped organizations migrate from NT4 to Windows 2003 and from Windows 2000 to Windows 2003 2-years prior to the product's formal launch on April 24, 2003. By the launch event, CCO migrated hundreds of servers (in production environments) to Windows Server 2003. 

CCO's President, Rand Morimoto, along with CCO consultant Michael Noel wrote and published (though Sams Publishing) a 1200-page book "Windows Server 2003 Unleashed" that released 2-weeks before the Windows 2003 product launch. The book has been updated 3 times, and the current "R2 Edition" covers the latest in Windows 2003 R2 information. 

CCO's helps organizations understand what's new in Windows Server 2003 to either migrate a single server, or an entire Active Directory to the new operating system.

Exchange v5.5 to Exchange 2003 Migration Design and Planning

CCO was 1 of 15 members of the Exchange 2003 Joint Development Program (JDP) that helped early adopter organizations plan and begin their migration from Exchange v5.5 to Exchange 2003. CCO's President, Rand Morimoto, along with 7 of CCOs consultants wrote one of the leading books on Exchange migrations (a Sams Publishing book)

Built from years of experience with the Exchange productline (that goes back to as early as 1993), CCO has developed best practices, tips, and tricks at preparing an existing Exchange v5.5 environment for a migration to Exchange 2003.

Exchange 2007 Migration Design and Planning

CCO was on the early adopter program for Exchange 2007 and had over 2-1/2 yrs of experience with Exchange 2007 before it's Jan/2007 launch. CCO's President, Rand Morimoto, along with 4 of CCOs consultants wrote what is now the #1 selling book in the world on Exchange 2007 titled "Exchange 2007 Unleashed" based on that years of experience

SharePoint 2007 Planning and Design

CCO has been working with SharePoint since the beta release of SharePoint 2001, about 8 years ago. Since that time, CCO has designed and implemented SharePoint solutions for many clients, ranging from non-profits to government agencies to world-wide enterprises. CCO consultants wrote an 850 page book, “SharePoint 2007 Unleashed” that covers in-depth configuration, implementation, and use of Microsoft Office SharePoint Services 2007 and Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services. 

CCO works with organizations to understand their business requirements and technology considerations, and then collaboratively designs and plans a SharePoint solution to meet their needs.

IP Scheme and DNS Redesign

CCO not only provides operating system and application design planning assistance, but also infrastructure design assistance in the areas of IP Scheme and DNS redesigns. For security purposes, because of an ISP change, or to setup a more robust meshed network design, many organizations are redesigning their IP Scheme. Not only does this require the design of segment addressing, but also a method of migrating from the old scheme to the new scheme without drastic interruption to the operation of the business 

CCO has helped dozens of organizations plan this redesign and staged implementation including DNS restructuring with minimal (if almost no) interruption of networking services to the organization. CCO provides best practice tips, tricks, and knowledge transfer based on successful previous implementations.

Security Audits and Reviews

With recent world events as well as State and Federal regulations (SOX for public companies, HIPAA for healthcare & GLBA for financial services), organizations are seriously evaluating their security systems to ensure they are protecting valuable organizational data assets. 

CCO consultants, Chris Amaris Andrew Abbate, Mark Weinhardt, and Rand Morimoto wrote the Pearson Education book "Network Security for Corporate Executives" that addresses security from desktops to servers to physical security and gateways to virus protection and wireless security. 

LDAP / Active Directory Integration Design

Many organizations have a mix of UNIX and Windows systems in their environment, and those with a multi-platform environment are constantly looking for ways to integrate the disparate directories each platform has. 

CCO, being a provider of services for both Microsoft Windows networking technologies as well as UNIX environments (SUN, Linux, HP/UX, AIX) provides assistance to organizations looking to plan and implement LDAP in their environment

1-yr, 3-yr, 5-yr Technology Roadmap and Budget Planning

Every year organizations go through budget cycles to have funds allocated for the ongoing maintenance of their network as well as new technology implementations. CCO assists organizations by providing a vision of the next 1-5 years of the future of technologies that ultimately lead to a documented technology roadmap and IT budget plan 

CCO has a qualified vision into the future of technologies because of its role on the beta and development cycle of products 3-5 years before the technology releases.  CCO President, Rand Morimoto, keynotes conventions around the world on a very popular topic "IT Technology Trends: A Sneak Peek in the Future"

Clustering / Fault Tolerance / Disaster Recovery Planning and Design Assistance

More critical to organizations than keeping abreast with new technologies is the ability to provide business continuity of their existing technologies in the event of a system failure or disaster. 

CCO provides disaster recovery planning assistance that involves designs built around clustering technologies, fault tolerance failover technologies, offsite data centers, network attached mirroring technologies.

Netware NDS / Windows Server 2003 Migration support, and  Integration and Co-existence Planning

CCO is a Novell Gold authorized integrator and as a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner, CCO has expertise in both networking environments. This allows clients to receive expert assistance at integrating or migrating from Novell eDirectory / NDS to a Microsoft Windows Active Directory environment, or to fully integrate the two directories together. 

CCO helps organizations plan, prepare, and integrate directories and operating systems to provide cross-platform services.

Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange Co-Existence Gateway & Migration Planning

In many enterprise environments, organizations frequently have both Lotus Notes as well as Microsoft Exchange messaging systems with the need to communicate between the two environments. 

CCO is a Lotus Notes Business Partner as well as Microsoft Certified Gold Partner with expertise in both platforms. CCO is extremely familiar with gateway products that allow both messaging systems to co-exist, as well as for organizations looking to migrate from Lotus Notes to Exchange, CCO is very familiar with tools available to migrate mailboxes as well as address books between environments.

Active Directory Group Policy Review, Planning, and Design

One of the most valuable technologies built in to Windows Server 2003 Active Directory is Group Policies. Group Policies allows the administrators of a network to centrally manage user and desktop configurations such as allowing users to drop to a DOS prompt or load software, the ability to modify system parameters, or the ability to push software and updates to systems. 

However to successfully design and implement an effective Group Policy structure is an art that someone with prior experience with Group Policies can provide significant value to anyone working with Group Policies for the first time. CCO has found best practices on what works and how the most common structure can be designed and implemented.

Desktop Imaging and Software Update Design Planning

Organizations with a lot of desktop and laptop systems have found ways to image systems and provide software updates through a series of add-on products like Ghost and SMS. However there are several new technologies that have recently become available that further simplify the desktop imaging and software update process. 

Some of these new technologies include Windows Server 2003 Remote Installation Service (RIS), Windows XP Automatic System Recovery (ASR), Microsoft Software Update Services (M/SUS), and Windows Server 2003 Intellimirror technologies. 

CCO helps organizations understand new methods of leveraging built-in and new add-in technologies to simplify the desktop management process in an organization.

Document Management and Data Management Design Planning

While disk storage has gotten cheap where an organization can easily put in hundreds of gigabytes of storage on the network, most of the information being stored (and backed up on a regular basis) is obsolete or duplicated information. With so much information, users have a hard time finding the information they want. 

New document management and data management technologies now provide organizations the ability to more easily store, look-up, and manage their information. 

CCO's consultants have written books on technologies like SharePoint Portal Server as well as Microsoft Index Service technologies that are just some of the tools available to assist organizations "get control" of their information.

Server Consolidation and System "Rightsizing" Planning

Over the years many organizations have repeatedly added more servers to their network to serve the needs of specific departments, or to satisfy the performance demands of the growing organization.  However as server technology has improved that allows a single server to host a significantly larger base of users, plus organizations consolidating information access requirements with organizational servers instead of departmental servers, the ability to consolidate or "rightsize" server allocation can drastically lower the overall cost of operations for an organization. 

CCO authored the 100+ page "rightsizing" guide for Microsoft that helps organizations understand methods of minimizing the number of servers used in a file/print or messaging environment utilizing technologies like Distributed File System (DFS), Network Load Balancing (NLB), and by adding multiple databases to a system