Business Situation

O₂ Germany began planning a desktop and Office migration of its almost 6,000 desktop workstations in January 2005.

At the start of the project, all of the O₂  desktops were running Office 97. The company had skipped the migration to Office 2000 to save cost and not disturb a functioning system. However, since Office 97 was now at the end of its lifecycle, O₂  planned to migrate to Microsoft Office 2003 and upgrade the operating system from Windows 2000 to Windows XP as part of the migration, thus promising performance and security improvements at the same time.

The existing hardware had to remain in operation as it stood; the availability of the applications for Customer Care, Billing and Provisioning (System Stack) were not to be impaired by the migration. Applications that were not run centrally were to be checked with regard to their compatibility with the new environment and adapted accordingly. Since O₂ works with fixed, three-month release cycles, there were tight deadlines. In the past, release changes at O₂ often led to dissatisfaction, because errors occurred after the changeover, which then had to be corrected.

Solution

Avanade began a proactive MAMO analysis (Migration Accelerator for Microsoft Office), of the existing desktop infrastructure in May 2005 to identify risk factors and possible error sources in the preliminary stages of the planned changeover and immediately remedy them.

The MAMO analysis revealed the weak points and potential errors and allowed O₂ departments to manage and eliminate the sources of errors themselves. This ensured that no major difficulties occurred and minor problems could be clarified immediately with the on-site contact person. One positive side effect of these cleanup efforts was the company gained disk space by deleting software that was identified as no longer in use.

Results

• The migration project was successfully completed – within the pre-specified timeframe and budget.
• All possible vulnerabilities were identified and eliminated ahead of time. The desktops were already “clean” before the migration.
• The cost of the migration was reduced by almost one third compared to the cost originally calculated by O₂