City of Midland Retired SolarWinds Serv-U After a One-Day Migration and Is Phasing Out Mapped Drives

The City of Midland is the municipal government of Midland, Texas: a city of roughly 132,000 people in the heart of the Permian Basin, one of the most economically dynamic regions in the country. Its work spans planning, engineering, utilities, public safety, and other municipal services.

Nearly all of that work runs on documents. Plats, plan sets, and engineering drawings move constantly between departments such as Planning, GIS, Engineering, and Building, and outward to the contractors and franchise utility companies that build and maintain the city’s infrastructure. How those files moved was the problem.

The city needed to retire Serv-U while preserving all 46 users’ passwords, then phase departments off mapped drives without a citywide cutover.

A Plat Request Was a Phone Call and a Hand-Copied File

The city ran two aging systems side by side. External file transfer went through an on-premises SolarWinds Serv-U FTP server, where IT created and managed every outside account individually. Internal sharing ran on on-premises file servers with mapped network drives, and in practice it ran on people. When someone in the city needed a plat, they called the GIS office. A staff member found the file and copied it by hand into a mapped folder the requester could reach.

Every exchange depended on a specific person being available to take the call and make the copy. Every group and permission behind those drives was administered manually by IT, which put IT in the middle of every access change. And the legacy FTP server had hit a wall on capability and scale: as file exchange grew across departments and with outside contractors and utilities, individually managed accounts and hand-carried files could not keep up. The city set out to modernize the whole estate, not just the FTP server.

Why the Old Estate Could Not Simply Be Switched Off

A big-bang cutover was never an option. Departments worked from the on-premises shares every day, so the old servers could not be turned off until each department had somewhere better to work. And the accounts on Serv-U belonged to contractors and utility companies, not city staff. Forcing outside organizations through a credential reset because the city changed platforms was exactly the kind of disruption the project was supposed to remove.

So the replacement had a specification before it had a name. It had to take over external transfer and user management from the FTP server, and absorb the existing accounts with their credentials intact. It had to connect the on-premises file servers so departments could keep working while they moved. It had to draw accounts from the city’s Azure directory instead of manual administration, and replace hand-managed access with group-based permissions. The City of Midland selected Files.com to be that platform.

One Day for the FTP Server, One Department at a Time for the Drives

Files.com became the city’s single exchange layer for both jobs, external transfer and internal sharing, and it was stood up alongside the old estate rather than through a risky cutover.

The Serv-U side moved first, and fast. The city exported 46 external and departmental users with SHA-256 hashed passwords and bulk-imported them into Files.com. The migration completed in about a day, and because the hashes imported directly, no contractor or utility company ever reset a password. Eleven users whose access spanned engineering and franchise-utility work were consolidated into a single managed group with folder permissions. Granting or revoking a company’s access became a group change instead of a per-account task.

The internal side moved on the city’s own schedule. The Files.com Agent, installed inside the city’s network and connecting outbound only, linked the on-premises file servers to Files.com with no inbound firewall changes. Bidirectional Syncs kept the old shares and the new department folders matched while people kept working from the drives they knew. The city piloted the cutover with its own Information Systems group, then set the pattern for everyone else: when a department is ready, stop its sync, close its access to the legacy share, and move its group onto Files.com. No department’s move disrupts another’s.

Identity moved to the directory at the same time. City accounts are provisioned from Azure Entra ID through SCIM, so someone added to the directory gets file access without IT creating anything by hand, and two-factor authentication is enforced site-wide. The city’s own IT training staff built the end-user curriculum for the departmental rollout, working from a walkthrough with the Files.com team.

Permissioned Folders Instead of Phone Calls

With Files.com in production, the City of Midland replaced a person-dependent exchange with permissioned folders, managed groups, and Share Links. The account-by-account Serv-U server is gone; as each department moves, permissioned folders replace the phone-call-and-copy workflow inside city hall.

• The Serv-U server is retired. Contractors and franchise utilities exchange files with Engineering through a managed group and folder permissions, not individually administered FTP accounts.
• In departments that have moved, a plat or plan-set request is served from a permissioned department folder or a Share Link, so nobody phones GIS and waits for a hand copy.
• All 46 Serv-U users moved in about a day with zero password resets because hashed credentials imported straight from the Serv-U export.
• Each department can retire its legacy share independently, without a citywide outage.

A Modernization Without a Cutover Weekend

Today, external file exchange in Midland does not depend on an aging FTP server. A contractor retrieves plan documents through a Share Link that carries its own controls. In departments that have moved, a plat comes from a folder the requester already has rights to instead of through a phone call, a hand copy, and a drive mapping. Access follows the city’s directory instead of a manually kept list.

The city removed those dependencies without ever scheduling a cutover weekend: Files.com went in alongside the old estate, migrated the Serv-U users in a day, and takes over the file servers one department at a time, each on its own schedule. For a government that could not stop production in order to modernize, that is the portable lesson — the old system did not have to go first.