AD Account Provisioning Transitions from Constellation to ADM

In January 2009, NIH consolidated its two overlapping Active Directory (AD) tools, Active Directory Manager (ADM) and Constellation, by transitioning the AD service to using ADM exclusively. AD tracks information about users, computers, printers, servers, network servers, etc., and is behind your access to NIH applications and network services through your NIH userID.

The transitioning project

The NIH Constellation to ADM Transition Project, led by CIT, began in July 2009, by validating existing account provisioning requirements for 17 individual organizations/ICs at NIH. Several entities within individual ICs had distinct organizational boundaries, necessitating specialized approaches for each inter-IC organization to accommodate different account provisioning requirements.

By mid-September, the project team began the final reviews with each IC/organization. Testing CIT’s implementation of requirements began in mid-October, and the process of switching over to production occurred in lockstep with completed testing. Within two months, in December 2009, ADM had seamlessly assumed full responsibility for account provisioning for all ICs—a total of 17 organizations plus data synchronization for all the others using AD.

Conclusion

All Active Directory provisioning was transitioned from Constellation to ADM by December 22, 2009, effectively retiring Constellation and making ADM the sole enterprise provisioning service at NIH.

NIH Constellation was formally retired on February 26, 2010. The success of this transition was due to the contributions, cooperation, and outstanding teamwork of the transition team and the IC IT community.

With the transition concluded, our focus is now on enhancing IC business processes by aligning ADM configuration and capabilities with current customer needs and customization requirements.

Questions

If you have questions about details of the transition, our enterprise provisioning services, or ADM, or would like to talk about your IC’s specific customization requirements, please contact the NIH IT Service Desk online at http://itservicedesk.nih.gov or by phone at 301-496-4357 (6-HELP) (local), 866-319-4357 (toll free), or 301-496-8294 (TTY).

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