Case Study: International Car Retailer

IT consultant implemented Azure Active Directory for a major European car dealer’s 1,200 Windows PC users—saving time and expanding client capacity.

Situation:

FLEXAMIT is a cloud-focused IT consulting company based in Belgium. For over 7 years, FLEXAMIT has worked to bring client IT facilities up to the most current and reliable standards. FLEXAMIT’s primary clients have always been SMBs with only a few hundred users to manage. But when they took on a major international car dealer as a client, FLEXAMIT knew some processes would need to change in order to efficiently implement Azure Active Directory (AAD) for 1,200 users across 20 different locations of a chain of car dealers in Europe.

When an existing PC with existing user profiles that has been used in a traditional on-premise Active Directory model is then joined to AAD, the new user profiles are empty. In many (or most) situations, those new AAD user profiles need to be populated with the data, settings, and sometimes even applications from the historical user profile. Not doing so would cause a major negative impact on end user productivity.

Previously for such transitions from on-premise AD to AAD, FLEXAMIT utilized scripts it had created to migrate the contents of the old AD user profiles to the new AAD user profiles. However, using those scripts would frequently take over an hour for each individual user profile migrated, a key reason why FLEXAMIT typically limited itself to the SMB market. Attempting to use such scripts and existing processes for a company that had 1,200 profiles to migrate would be a massive amount of time and money. Realizing this, FLEXAMIT began searching for a solution. That’s when they found Laplink’s PCmover Profile Migrator (PPM), a tool recommended by Microsoft for exactly such scenarios.

Solution:

“At this moment, with PCmover Profile Migrator, on average we can migrate one user profile within 15 to 20 minutes. If we didn’t have the software, it would take us at least an hour (per profile).”

Laplink’s PPM software makes transferring the contents of user profiles from an on-prem AD-joined profile to an AAD-joined profile easy and painless, taking the hassle out of implementing Azure Active Directory. And by assisting with easily implementing cloud-based solutions like AAD, PPM is a perfect fit with FLEXAMIT’s philosophy of flawless, easy, and productive IT.

FLEXAMIT Founder Wim van Sprundel also noted that PPM eliminated the risk for human error and produces a consistent outcome. When a profile is migrated, van Sprundel explained, the user becomes hyper-aware of any changes, such as with background images, file locations, and more. “We’re focused on getting rid of these end user concerns and feedback,” van Sprundel said, and that’s what PCmover Profile Migrator does.

For this international car dealer using just two IT specialists, FLEXAMIT fully converted 14 workstations, each with eight user profiles (a total of 112 user profiles), in three days. Using FLEXAMIT’s old processes, that project would have taken almost two weeks.

Benefit:

After their experience using PPM with this larger client, van Sprundel says FLEXAMIT will “certainly” use the Laplink software for other customers in the future. Not only did PPM save FLEXAMIT and its international car dealer client significant time and money, but it also demonstrated to FLEXAMIT that they are able to handle clients with more than a few hundred user profiles to transition to AAD.