RM's CC4 removal service

[TeachGeek1]

Hi

 

Our school is currently in the planning process of removing CC4 and migrating to a Vanilla network, this is something that is entirely new to me and so I'm nervous about mucking it up. I've seen on other posts about a CC4 removal service that RM offers but can't find any mention of it elsewhere. Has anyone had experience of this service and/or know if it is still running.

 

Also as I've mentioned this is the first time I've done something like this, is there a good list of things to think about when mapping and planning out this project. I think I've got the general gist of things to do but I just want to make sure that I'm on the right track.

 

Thanks

[Andy2789]

Afternoon

 

The School I am at now, when I took over was a RM CC4 network and I ripped it all out. Are you planning on utilising the same servers / domain? Or are you getting new hardware etc? As this will all impact upon the amount of work, when it came to moving away from RM I terminated the agreement and we did the migration ourselves. Are you keeping any support contract with RM?

 

We couldn't wait to get away, so we made sure we made a clean break from RM and haven't looked back since!

 

More than happy to give some pointers if this will help

[TeachGeek1]

Currently our plans our:

 

Replace the servers (They need replacing regardless)

Hardware should all be staying the same

Happy to stay with our current domain to ease the workload a bit

There are still a number of pieces of RM hardware/software we use around the site, whilst the hardware will still work I'm not sure if software that was packaged by RM will cease to function.

 

Do you have recommendation for software that you used to help with, any kind of User migration/deployment software? This project was my predecessor's idea and convinced SLT before they left and hasn't given me any pointers on what they had in mind/started on already.

[psydii]

We did a full cross forest domain migration.

 

New usernames for everyone using new automation tools. Took the opportunity to automate Class / Form / Teacher groups using Salamander. We used Robocopy and icacls to move all the files over and swap out old SIDs for the SIDs of the equivelent objects in the new AD.

Mailboxes were done via exporting/importing pst - not sure why a mailbox move wasn't used (I ran the 2007->2010 Exchange migration into the CC4 network, but didn't run the Exchange part of the 2010->2013 migration away from CC4)

 

Apps were all repackaged using InstallShield over a period of several months ahead of the migration.

 

SCCM (now MEM CM) was used to replace the device administration component of CC4.

 

 

However today with the cloud etc, we might make different decisions. (pure Intune rather than Group Policy / MEMCM, ditch the on prem email service, maybe even consider not having on prem AD at all...)

[Andy2789]

That makes life a lot easier if you have new servers, so what we did was build the new server and the structure while the existing RM servers ran the RM network. We utilised the same domain and created a new structure, security groups, deployments and users and Shares on the new servers. You can even promote new DC's without RM running it will be fine, then you can setup new client stations and test the environment as you build the Group Policies etc. Then when you are ready to switch, you can either migrate the users (if keeping the same usernames) and update their security groups, Homepaths over and start to decommission the RM servers from being DC's and take them off the domain so they remove their RM tentacles from your network.

 

Once you've got your new environment setup along side your existing, as long as it's outside of what RM can see it is quite painless to make the migration.

[Davit2005]

When we did this with RM CC3 we found a RM user account that was changing GP back to the RM settings. We did not go that much further than jus disabling the account. Then we rebuilt the DCs without the CC RM bits. Used new OU's, I think we created new policies I cannot quite remember it was over 10 years back.

 

If you are removing jus note everything that CC is doing for you. Everything can be done by third party tools and/or , running MDT/WDS/SCCM for OS deployments, PowerShell can be used for creating user accounts, GPO used for deploying printers, etc.

Edited October 13, 2022 by Davit2005

[ITGURU]

You can do this without any major effects - did the procedure myself when inheriting an RM school. RM is just management tools centralised based on everything you'd do separately, ADUC, GPO, etc. All i did was spin up new servers, promoted to AD, moved file shares to new servers etc, uninstalled/dcpromo'd RM servers, job done.

Only cleanup i have left to do is remove/change some legacy security groups. no need to change any usernames or policies.

[MartinT]

We started this two years ago and finally disconnected the RM DCs three months ago. Do it slowly and carefully so as not to break things during the migration. Preserve security while you're migrating by applying updates to both new and old servers.

 

We setup a new domain and new vanilla VM servers with new accounts for all. The sharing was a pain as was dual AD Azure sync while we were running both domains. This is where things can break if you're not careful. We did go GPO because we didn't feel ready to go pure InTune, although we're starting to make use of that now.

 

It was a great feeling to finally demote the last RM DC and get rid of it.