The AD Project
Information Technology will implement Active Directory (AD) in phases beginning in Spring Semester of 2009. The entire implementation will take over a year. Every faculty and staff machine (PC) as well as every open lab machine must be physically touched and converted to Active Directory.
All university-owned user workstations (PC or Laptop -- Mac or Windows) will be migrated to AD. The migration will be done on both Novell and non-Novell machines. For Novell users, Novell files will be moved at some point in the process to equivalent AD file shares --either personal, departmental, university or custom file share areas. Ex: All active and necessary F-Shared files will be moved to an equivalent file share area on AD.
Student PCs will not need to be converted to AD as they are not university owned machines but all students will be assigned an AD account and will receive personal file space which they can access from anywhere (on or off campus as long as they have an internet connection -- visit www.wku.edu/mystuff ). This migration process is a huge undertaking and will require significant IT resources to accomplish.
Your Novell userid and your LDAP userid (same as Email userid) will be replaced by a single, unique Active Directory account userid called a NetID. This NetID will be used to login to most applications and services on campus. Your NetID will require a strong password and it will require you to change your password periodically.