Largest Home Improvement Retailer
One of the largest home improvement retail organizations in the United States wanted to standardize on Microsoft Exchange and specifically intended to provide employees with greater access to messaging systems internally or externally. The company also wanted to reduce administrative costs for messaging and improve integration of the desktop messaging client with office productivity applications. InfraScience engaged with this client in all aspects of a migration from Lotus Notes to Exchange 2003 and from Novell Netware to Microsoft Server 2003.
Since this client's environment includes 17,000 users across multiple locations and subsidiaries, the assessment and design phases were of utmost importance to the overall success of the migration. During the course of the project, InfraScience provided complete project management services, cost reporting, status reporting and led weekly team meetings to address issues, assign tasks and shift timelines according to business contingencies.InfraScience also developed a utility to automate the workstation modifications thereby eliminating manual intervention on the desktop during the migration. InfraScience's creativity and thorough understanding of the environment saved the company thousands of dollars in transition costs. The end user community enjoyed minimal outage during the project. Complete knowledge transfer of the new environment occurred through regular technical updates with the company staff along the way.
World Leading Manufacturer and Distributor
The client's current environment consisted of an earlier version of Microsoft's identity management product. This product, known as MMS or Microsoft's MetaDirectory Services (formerly ZOOMIT), was being used to provide GAL Synchronization services between two separate Exchange 5.5 organizations using multiple LDAP management agents.The client engaged InfraScience, in partnership with Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS), to assist in this effort because of their rare expertise with MMS and because of their experience with Exchange migrations. They had already implemented the Active Directory Connector (ADC) between the Exchange 5.5 environments and their respective Active Directory forests. And with the ADC in place, the logical solution was to replace MMS with Microsoft's Identity Integration Server (MIIS)*. InfraScience developed and implemented a solution that leveraged two MIIS GAL Synchronization Management Agents (one for each forest). The result of the engagement was a fully automated GAL Synchronization solution that involved over 30,000 Active Directory user, contract, and group objects.
Leading Transportation Services Company
The company consists of a national branch network of transportation professionals serving the United States, Canada and Mexico. They were frustrated with the Lotus Notes R7 environment. The company had numerous issues with Notes integration with third party products such as SalesLogix. They also were not pleased with the limitation of Notes regarding delayed responses of Out of Office notices, limited features with Notes web access and the complexity of the use of Notes in its environment. Moving to Exchange 2007 gave the client a tighter integration with other mainline applications. The migration to Outlook also helped the company integrate their message system with Active Directory providing a single point of administration.InfraScience evaluated their current Active Directory environment and implemented Exchange 2007 based on the business and technical requirements. InfraScience used Quest Notes Migrator to migrate distribution groups and all messages, calendars, tasks, contacts and personal contacts on each user's workstation quickly with zero downtime. The majority of the company's email was converted a couple of days before the production migration and only the updated messages of the mailboxes were applied the actual migration weekend. They switched from Notes to Exchange 2007 and messages were up to date within 3 hours.
Largest Department Store Retailer
The client's extensive and diverse workforce includes approximately 188,000 employees. Moving to Windows 2000 and a single Active Directory domain allowed the retailer to achieve the implementation of a strategic goal and a more efficient, effective and centralized administrative model. The main challenges in implementing the solution was a highly decentralized environment, limited administrative personnel and enforceable networking standards and policies. InfraScience responded to the challenges by developing and implementing a custom migration solution using Quest's Migrator, Microsoft's ADMT v2.0 and Microsoft's Visual Basic scripting interfaces.The migration was customized and used to minimize effect on end users during the transitional timeframe. InfraScience worked tightly with the retailer's project management, resources and administrative personnel to fine tune all migration processes, operational standards, migration and operations guidelines that assisted in the quick and efficient transition to the new centralized environment. The end result was a successfully migrated decentralized environment to a centralized environment. The solution involved the retail and support environments with more than 50,000 Windows machines.
International Hotel Group
The client engaged InfraScience to design, test, and implement a solution that would migrate their highly decentralized environment from Windows NT and Exchange 5.5 to a more centralized global Microsoft Active Directory and Exchange 2003 environment. The main challenges in designing the solution were a lack of interoperable critical infrastructures and enforceable networking standards and policies. InfraScience responded to the challenges by developing a custom migration solution using Quest's Domain and Exchange Migration software along with Microsoft's Visual Basic scripting interfaces. The end result was a successfully migrated decentralized environment to a more centralized regional based environment with a standardized and interoperable infrastructure. The solution involved the corporate environment along with the hotels environment. The two environments consisted of over 30,000 Windows based user, contact, and group objects.