Pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca has completed its implementation of a new e-mail system that has seen a 60 percent consolidation of the server environment, leading to significant financial savings.
The decision to install a new e-mail system was primarily a security-driven one. The old system was attached to two domains, synchronized together, but sharing information across the domains was difficult and not completely secure.
A new system, based on Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, was created parallel to the old system to avoid disruption to employees. HP handled migration to the new system. The whole project took nearly two years. Gary Keogh, global program manager at AstraZeneca, says: "Most of the two-year period was taken up with planning and preparation. The actual migration itself only took five months."
About 65,000 users across the world will benefit from the upgrade, with each one only experiencing about 15 minutes of disruption as their email service was switched to the new domain. There was very little training involved, says Keogh. "As it was a new domain and exchange server, the interface remained the same. This meant there was not much training needed."AstraZeneca expects to see a return on the investment within the first year.
Source: CBR Online, http://cbronline.com