Softline implemented the project on migration of corporate mail of GM Avtovaz company based on the Microsoft Exchange Server platform

GM Avtovaz is the joint venture of the American corporation General Motors and the Russian JSC AvtoVAZ releasing the Chevrolet Niva cars. All IT infrastructure of the plant is concentrated in uniform DPC in the city of Togliatti. Long time more than 700 employees the mail Lotus Domino system was the main instrument of corporate interaction for. The server of IBM also supported work of the portal and document flow.

Choosing a Solution

The guide of the customer aimed to simplify system maintenance and also to cut down expenses on licenses, and made the decision on upgrade of IT infrastructure. Implementation of mail based on Microsoft Exchange became its first stage. Thanks to successful experience of the previous interaction of Softline it was selected for migration of the solution based on Microsoft Exchange Server 2013.

Project Progress

The project consisted of three stages:

• Inspection and development of documentation. At this stage the solution architecture was defined, the plan of migration is created. All risks were considered and necessary changes in the domain AD are formulated.
• Preparation of infrastructure and deployment of the solution. Before implementation preparation of the domain was carried out, and at the request of the customer expansion of the scheme AD was carried out to New Year's holidays. Deployment took two weeks.
• Migration. At first engineers of Softline transferred pilot group of 50 users, having explained to the customer's administrators how to carry out further this task. Transfer of other boxes was executed by the customer's forces.

Result

Within the project by means of the solutions Notes Migrator for Exchange of Dell Software about 700 mailboxes were migrated, and from Lotus all was transferred: letters and contacts of users, personal and server archives and also address directories. System architecture is based on three servers: two servers of the mailboxes united in a failover cluster, and one server of client access.

Thanks to implementation of Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 the customer simplified administration and service of mail, improved integration with AD and also achieved significant savings of funds for licenses. Besides, the cluster architecture developed by Softline provides the increased fault tolerance. In the next year expansion of a system, implementation in subsidiary companies and growth of number of users till 1000 is planned. Transfer of the portal on Microsoft SharePoint will become the second stage of upgrade of corporate IT infrastructure.

"Migration with Lotus is an unusual and interesting challenge: many clients are afraid of transition to a new mail system because of possible data loss. Therefore it is very indicative that the project passed without difficulties — engineers of Softline transferred all information from an old system to Exchange, without interrupting business processes. Thus, upon transition to the Microsoft platform the client, without losing anything, gets advantages of a monovendornost and economy of means", - Vitaly Popov, the head of group of infrastructure decisions of department of solutions of Microsoft of Softline company commented on migration results.

"We worked with Softline already earlier, and this time specialists of this company again successfully implemented assigned tasks. We plan continuation of cooperation in the field of transfer of a corporate portal for SharePoint and also we consider the possibility of implementation of Lync, integration with a city telephone network and implementations of functionality of voice mail", - Sergey Dombrovsky, the chief financial officer of GM Avtovaz company told about the project