The challenge
The Conference Board of Canada was rebranding, and a new corporate name meant a new namespace across every technology platform. Email addresses, sign-in identities, SharePoint URLs and the applications that depended on all three had to change together, on a date the organization had already set for its internal launch and public announcement.
The work sat on top of an on-premises Active Directory estate that CBoC also wanted gone. Renaming the namespace and moving identity to the cloud could have been two projects with two cutovers. Doing them as one meant every dependency, from mail routing to hard-coded SharePoint links, had to be found before anything moved.
Our approach
BITSUMMIT ran the engagement over fourteen weeks, with tracks in parallel where that was safe and a go/no-go gate before the production cutover.
Map every dependency before touching anything
Discovery workshops inventoried identity, email, SSO, Teams, SharePoint and legacy integrations, capturing AD sync, mail routing and line-of-business links. The phase produced impact reports for Microsoft 365 and Azure, a tested rollback method, and a communication plan aligned to the announcement date.
Prove the path on a pilot group first
Entra ID identities were pre-provisioned with licensing, Conditional Access and MFA, and an Intune and Autopilot enrolment path was built with profile backup and restore. A controlled pilot ran the full sequence before legacy directory sync retirement was approved.
Cut over in waves, not all at once
Microsoft 365 domain configuration and workstation migration ran as parallel tracks. Every identity moved to a new primary SMTP and UPN with the old domain retained as an alias, and workstations followed in two scheduled waves with post-wave health checks and floor-level hypercare.
Remediate what an identity change breaks
Servers and Azure VMs were re-joined with service identities reconciled workload by workload. SAML and OIDC applications were re-registered against the new namespace, and the SharePoint Online and OneDrive tenant rename was executed as a one-time operation with no rollback available.
Retire the on-premises estate
With authentication running through Entra ID, Azure AD Connect was removed, domain controllers demoted, AD-integrated DNS zones migrated, and GPOs and logon scripts replaced by Intune policy. Knowledge transfer and the documentation set closed the engagement.
The outcome
CBoC launched on its new name on schedule, with a unified namespace across email, identity, SharePoint and OneDrive. Nothing is left on-premises: no domain controllers, no directory sync, no AD-integrated DNS. User identity, device management and policy now run through Entra ID and Intune.
The old domain stayed live as an alias throughout, so mail kept flowing while users moved in waves rather than overnight. The SharePoint tenant rename, which cannot be undone once executed, went ahead only after the full inventory of sites, links and Power Platform connectors was mapped and a go/no-go was signed.
