Active Directory Split for Temple Inland in Austin, TX

My husband and I worked for the company Temple Inland as contractors in 2007. We were both hired as Information Technology contractors to help split the company into three independent parts. They would split into Temple Inland Corrugated Packing Company, Guaranty Bank, and ForeStar Real Estate Group.

This was a very interesting assignment for both my husband and I. Our jobs were supposed to be the active directory migration experts. First of all, we were supposed to interview each employee within the company and annotate the data they had on their system. The second part was to migrate their data over to the respected domain.

This was a challenge from the very beginning. Us being humans, we don't like change and are afraid of it. All of the migration team members had a big task ahead of them. We were all looked at in disgust. We all gritted our teeth because we knew that we had a job to accomplish.

The first big task was identifying who was moving to which company and who was staying. We had the company split into sections. For example there was HR, Payroll, Planning, and so on. Next the people in that section were identified. After that, we had to figure out what independent company the employee was going move to.

The domains that we had were myinland.com, guarantybank.com, and real.com. If an employee was staying with the bank then nothing had to change. If an employee was going to the packaging side then we had to proceed with migrating their data over to the corrugated packing domain. All the migration experts did this process until everyone that was suppose to be with the bank, remained with the bank and everyone that was supposed to be moved to corrugated packaging was moved respectfully.

After the successful migrations took place between the bank and the corrugated packing aspect, we had to migrate all the real estate users to real.com. The real estate group was going to have their own separate domain that was apart from everyone else's. The real estate group was a lot harder to migrate because they had offices in several different states. Doing a migration over the phone wasn't a fun thing to do. However, our expert team of migration experts successfully completed the task.

In the end, the migration team completed the company's split ahead of time and ahead of schedule and within budget. This was a surprise to all the upper management. The active directory project was viewed as a project that would fail. The project would have failed if we didn't have all the support of our supervisors.

Today, Temple-Inland, Guaranty Bank, and ForeStar Real Estate Group operate as independent entities. In my opinion, I'm not sure that was the best way to go especially in the current economy. However, the job of splitting the company was a chore but it was completed successfully by all the migration experts and we were rewarded for our achievement.