The total re-branding of the Caesars Gauteng Hotel Casino and Convention Resort at Kempton Park as Emperors Palace, following the purchase of the business out of the international Caesars Group, involved a complicated overhaul and cleanup of the IT infrastructure.
As part of the brand change exercise, which included branded carpets, windows, internal and external signage and even casino chips, a contract for the overhaul of the branding in the IT infrastructure was awarded to the business solutions division of the Square One Solutions Group, a JSE-listed ICT company.
"From the technology perspective, Emperors Palace needed to ensure that within a specific time-frame, absolutely no references to Caesars remained within the entire Microsoft IT infrastructure, including Active Directory and Exchange," said Square One project manager Charmaine Cross.
"The overall IT environment at Emperors Palace is highly complex, being also populated with many gaming-specific applications, and there are more than 700 workstations and users. Therefore extensive planning and project management using multiple resources was required, particularly to meet system uptime needs as the gaming facilities operate 24 hours a day, every day."
At the core of the project was the migration of the entire Active Directory and Exchange domains to new domains that were created without any references to Caesars and without incurring any system downtime. The old domains were then decommissioned and the entire project was completed in six weeks.
"We decided to use standard Microsoft migration tools supported by our own in-house automation and scripting skills to ensure streamlined, trouble-free migration," said Adrian Thomas, Square One's lead technical consultant for the project.
"The functionality of the Microsoft tools was enhanced by the writing of special software to fill any gaps. Gaming and non-gaming software systems, as well as hotel management applications, were then successfully migrated and the environment was redeployed in a way that ensured a highly stable architecture upon which Emperors Palace can now continue to build, improve and maintain its IT systems."
The team worked throughout the night to carry out some of the migrations and there was close co-operation for the duration of the project with the Emperors Palace IT staff and numerous third-party vendors.
"Automation and scripting skills were the key to this project as they were the medium through which all the references to Caesars were removed across the entire system," added Thomas.
Major risks were incurring downtime and the possibility of the specialised gaming applications not functioning properly in the new domains. The risks were minimised and avoided through attention to detail and project analysis, planning and management.
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