Over the years, Accenture has grown from a primarily management consulting business into a company that provides an array of services, including business consulting, systems integration, application outsourcing, IT infrastructure outsourcing, and business process outsourcing. Accenture needed a solution that would allow it to collaborate not only among themselves, but also with their clients and alliance partners. Accenture needed to extend effective communication and collaboration beyond internal boundaries. In addition, Accenture needed a solution that provided flexible options for its highly-mobile workforce – over half of Accenture employees spend three-fourths of their time outside the office.

Accenture made a strategic decision to transition to a Microsoft solution for messaging and collaboration. Accenture launched a global effort to migrate from their existing Lotus Notes platform to a Microsoft platform, using a phased, multi-year approach. The first step involved updating mail-dependent applications to function equally well with both Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange. This cleared the way for step two: the rapid migration of nearly 80,000 e-mail users in 48 countries. At the height of the migration, the project team transferred up to 4,000 e-mail users a week. The final phase involves deploying the new Microsoft collaboration environment and, where necessary, the phased migration of key applications.

Accenture had strong Microsoft infrastructure skills within their IT organization, but they wished to supplement their team and expand their Microsoft Exchange capabilities. Enter Avanade. Using a blended Accenture-Avanade team, they designed the new Exchange 2000 messaging infrastructure, the e-mail routing infrastructure, and the perimeter security solution.

• Designed the new Exchange 2000 messaging infrastructure.
• Designed the e-mail routing infrastructure required to manage the transition and to support the new solution.
• Designed the perimeter security solution using Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server to manage access to the new e-mail infrastructure.