​Business Situation
The City of Seattle’s Novell GroupWise messaging solution did not integrate well with the City’s desktop tools such as Microsoft Office or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. A growing number of third-party providers produce applications that integrate with Office Outlook rather than with GroupWise. The City wanted to migrate from an increasingly obsolete e-mail service to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. The project would involve more than 11,000 employees working in 35 departments, and include 12,415 GroupWise mailboxes and 2.6 terabytes of data. The City needed a partner to finish the migration by the end of 2009.

Solution
The City of Seattle selected Avanade to implement its Exchange Server 2007 environment. Using project leads to simplify the logistics of working with 35 departments, the team performed a Microsoft Exchange configuration review and made changes to the design to handle storage issues. Avanade also accommodated the City’s complex Active Directory topology into the migration project. Taking advantage of its proprietary logistics management and reporting database to manage the migration, Avanade used the Quest Software tool to migrate 500 users per week, completing the project on schedule and 15 percent under budget.  During the migration, Avanade successfully solved reply-ability issues and developed a workaround to accommodate one department’s stringent  security requirements

Results
Post-migration, Avanade provided a high level of support to employees confronted with the new e-mail service.

With the successful rollout of a Microsoft Exchange/Outlook messaging solution, the City of Seattle has an extensible platform that aligns with its technology road map to deliver better business value.

“Exchange is central to our plans to roll out IT solutions that improve employee productivity,” says Bill Schrier, Chief Technology Officer, City of Seattle. “For example, we will be able to implement a new citizen relationship management solution, which is compatible with Exchange and Outlook. We can write business rules to launch workflows to automate and simplify how our employees serve Seattle citizens.”