Made My Day

I got a phone call from a friend/former co-worker today that really made my day. It was good to hear from him, but that's not the part what was so cool.

My old company is centralizing some computer network functions that are currently decentralized -- specifically, they're centralizing the mail system. For what it's worth, I think it's a great idea... it will reduce the required amount of manpower and equipment significantly, and there will be fewer points of failure and better redundancy. In other words, they're doing more with less.

Part of this consolidation required the folks from corporate to go to my old job site and evaluate what's what. Apparently the folks from corporate were impressed with what I had built, and told my friend that my Active Directory Structure was the best they had seen at any business unit in the company. That's some pretty serious validation, considering that I built the structure strictly based on reading books... no formal training or education of any sort.

The nice part (from a builder's standpoint) is that I was able to build a new network from the ground up and forklift data from the old domain to the new forest, allowing me to custom-build things from scratch. The cool part is that I made things scalable, so it remained "the best network" even as we added new sites and changed functions. But like I said, I think the coolest part is that it's the best, a year and a half after I left, and almost five years after I started constructing it.