At Antelope Valley Healthcare, 12 employees have spent most of the last six months determining the optimal way to structure Active Directory for their organization. The group uses scenarios that reflect the rules and reality of their company's business to test how easily user rights can be established, changed, and moved. For example, if the organization adds a skilled nursing facility, it has to be easy to fit those employees into the Active Directory hierarchy and give them the appropriate security access to servers and applications. "We're trying to predict where our organization is going to be in a year or two," says Shehata. "The last thing we want to do is hinder business."

Beers Construction Co., a commercial construction company in Atlanta, is deploying Windows 2000 Server and Advanced Server. To plan for the implementation, four people from Beers' IT department met with key people in the company's hospital, school, and public-sector construction departments, as well as with employees responsible for accounting at the corporate and lower levels. They reviewed the structure of the company and identified what types of information must be shared among groups. They also planned for growth and for the possibility that the parent company, Skanska AB in Stockholm, Sweden, might want to connect domains in the future. "It has to be easy to fit the domain models together," says Ortez Gude, VP of IT.

Under NT 4.0, Beers' single domain must be centrally maintained by a domain administrator located at the company's headquarters. Otherwise, for example, a person in the Nashville, Tenn., office with administration rights could change the access rights and privileges of someone at one of the 10 other local offices. With Windows 2000, headquarters can delegate authority for Nashville updates to someone in that office, or at any of Beers' hundreds of construction sites. Regardless of where the administration occurs, the rest of the network remains secure, and Active Directory automatically synchronizes directories throughout the system.

Administration is also simplified because applications are included under the Active Directory umbrella. If a person moves across town because he or she is at a new work site, their human-resource information must be updated in several places, including the Exchange directory, marketing- and resource-tracking software, and an employee-resumé database.

Information on what resources the employee can access at his or her new site will also change. Under NT 4.0, all these applications must be updated separately, but with Windows 2000, the data will be entered once and Active Directory will automatically synchronize it across applications.

Credit Suisse First Boston is planning for deployment on a global scale. The investment bank operates more than 60 offices across more than 30 countries worldwide, with four major operating divisions. The bank's global engineering department, split between New York, London, Zurich, and four Pacific locations, has ongoing responsibility for designing a shared infrastructure for the company. For about a year, three people from global engineering have led a Windows 2000 project team that includes representatives from all the operating divisions. By mid-2000, the department will place a standardized configuration for PCs and servers on a network server, and the company's four divisions will install it from there.

Testing at Credit Suisse First Boston is also coordinated by the Windows 2000 project team. All applications and hardware used in the bank are being checked to make sure they work with the operating system. Select users are testing Windows 2000 Professional, Server, and Advanced Server, with more users to be added by the end of the first quarter in 2000. Tests done so far show that spreadsheets and Word documents from a server open 25% faster with Windows 2000 than with NT 4.0, due to an improved file system.

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Photo of Gude by Mark Escher