Business Situation
Cooper Industry was the only division within its parent company still operating on the Novell platform. With its Novell license set to expire, it was time for the customer to join its sister divisions on the Microsoft platform. In need of the resources and knowledge to perform the migration, the customer turned to Avanade, a long-time partner of its parent company.

Solution
Avanade was selected to help Cooper Industries deploy a common global Active Directory domain and Exchange 2003 infrastructure for 10,000 employees across 9 different divisions as part of its strategy to create a cohesive global organization.

The methodology used for this project was Avanade Connected Methods (ACM) for Technology Infrastructure with detailed project tracking/earned value analysis provided via Avanade’s Project Management Tracking (PMT) tool. This project leveraged a combined Avanade and Cooper Industries team under a very tight deadline/milestone structure and was delivered on-time and within budget.

Avanade was subsequently engaged by Cooper Industries on a 2,000 user Novell to Active Directory / Exchange migration project for an additional division that was not included as part of the original migration initiative. That engagement also leveraged the same methodology and project tracking controls under a combined team engagement structure that completed the project on-time and within budget.

Results
Through a better integration with Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Office, the customer will be able to reduce operating costs with a single environment to support, improve user productivity and improve user satisfaction.