Major mail migration rolls out in record time
“From a Waikato DHB perspective this migration is another significant milestone in our IS systems infrastructure transformation programme and our most visible to date. The professionalism, positive attitude and efforts of the entire Datacom team are very much appreciated. I can't speak highly enough of your team.” Waikato District Health Board, Infrastructure Programme Manager, IS PMO, Mike Duffey
Solution snapshot
Customer
Waikato District Health Board
Industry
Health
Business need
The Waikato District Health Board needed to replace its legacy Novell email system, as it sought a new, fully supported system that would boost efficiency and reduce operational costs.
Solution
Working with the DHB IS team, the Datacom team from Hamilton and Auckland rolled out a new centralised Microsoft based infrastructure for the district health board’s 3,500+ users – over one weekend, with minimal disruption to service.
Benefits
• Reduced cost of ownership from a centralised and consolidated email platform
• Reduced business risk as the new environment was fully vendor supported and widely supported by Datacom
• Improved functionality, performance and resilience of a key business critical system used by 3,500+ staff whose primary objective is to deliver medical care to New Zealanders living across the greater Waikato region
• Reduced technical footprint with the introduction of enterprise level email archiving
• Reduced training cost for new staff as email is now provided by an industry standard toolset
Case study
Legacy system needs overhaul
The Waikato District Health Board (Waikato DHB) employs more than 5,800 staff and plans, funds and provides hospital and health services to more than 360,000 people in a region covering eight per cent of New Zealand.
The large health provider had been running Novell GroupWise to provide email services, which was classed as legacy and was no longer vendor supported. It was also running on an ageing IBM SAN. The old system was distributed throughout the hospitals and the Waikato DHB wanted to centralise its systems to reduce operational costs.
To achieve this operational goal, the Waikato DHB recognised the need to migrate to a new, fully supported email system. Key to this project was a requirement for a minimum amount of downtime and minimal support costs as the organisation did not want to operate two systems in parallel.
Following on from the success of another project with the Waikato DHB, Datacom was approached to replace the existing distributed Novell NetWare infrastructure with a new centralised Microsoft Windows based infrastructure for its 3000+ users.
Tough timelines present challenges
The project team was challenged as they were working to extremely aggressive timelines and high expectations, such as 5,000 plus mailboxes migrated over a single weekend. The time available to design, test and deploy the solution was very limited, so the project had to be delivered extremely efficiently.
Datacom worked with the DHB’s internal team to deliver the project on time and migrated all mailboxes over the Easter weekend 2010. Datacom’s experience and expertise in managing complex delivery projects and using the right combination of best practices, smart tools and people delivered the outcome the customer was after.
All Waikato DHB users are now using Outlook 2007 to access their email, calendaring and tasks held in Microsoft Exchange 2007.
Key points
• The Waikato District Health Board’s already existing relationship with Datacom in other areas created the synergy to discuss Datacom’s ability to assist the organisation in the ambitious mail migration project.
• The Waikato DHB had selected the Microsoft Exchange product and required Datacom’s Professional Services team’s skills to design, pilot and deploy the solution of their choice.
• The scale of this project required over 3000 users and 5000 mailboxes to be migrated over one weekend. Datacom was able to bring together the best of its team, from both Hamilton and Auckland, and were able to scale the resources up for the peak. Over the migration weekend, there were 55 floor walkers, plus the migration team of five, plus a service desk.
• The Datacom Professional Services team delivered a quality outcome based on best practice, focus and experience.
• Leadership and governance from a combined DHB and Datacom Professional Services team ensured a highly successful deployment in short timeframe
This Case Study for Waikato District Health Board is provided by Datacom.