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Background
Located halfway between Houston and Galveston, Texas City Independent School District provides services to approximately 6000 students. Texas City ISD had many aging technologies that needed replacing.
The Challenge: Switching from Novell to Microsoft quickly, painlessly, and seamlessly
Texas City ISD decided to replace its Novell eDirectory environment with Microsoft Active Directory. Part of the project involved migrating from the Novell Groupwise collaboration system to Microsoft Exchange 2007.The Director of Technology, Steve Shields and the IT staff felt that a Windows environment was better suited for the multitude of diverse applications used by teachers in the educational process.
The Groupwise to Exchange migration took 3 or 4 days of prep-work installing servers and collecting storage information. It was essential not to interrupt the daily operations of the district. After discussing it with the IT staff and M+ Archive Texas City ISD felt that the email migration could be done as a first step. "The Messaging Architects professional services team was critical in the planning stages. They really helped us build a blueprint for the migration to Microsoft Exchange using M+Archive. Everything happened in the background and did not disrupt day-to-day operations; then we were able to flip the switch on the weekend," said Shields.
The Benefits of M+Archive: A single cost-effective platform to migrate and archive
When Shields was researching how to approach the email migration, he immediately saw the advantages of M+Archive over other migration tools. M+Archive solved not only the problem of migrating data from one email platform to another, but it also provided an interoperable archiving solution to meet email retention requirements.
According to Shields, the email migration from GroupWise to Exchange was the easiest part of the entire migration due to the functionality provided by M+Archive. Essentially, M+Archive was the “middleman” between the GroupWise and the Exchange systems. First, the IT staff archived the messages in the GroupWise system to a centralized M+Archive repository. Next they set up the Exchange system, and pointed it to the M+Archive repository to continue the archiving process in the new environment.
Depending on the needs of the respective users, Shield’s team injected different amounts of email data from the GroupWise to the live Exchange system. In some cases, the entire contents of the GroupWise account were injected into Exchange, in other cases, only 2-3 months’ worth of data were brought back into the live production system. M+Archive creates a repository folder with the archived Groupwise data which is accessible via the Outlook Web Access client. "The users were able to access their entire Groupwise in the repository using OWA."
The transition was virtually seamless for the end users: even though they changed email clients, they were in no way hindered in accessing their archives, regardless of whether they were in GroupWise or Exchange.
Texas City ISD will continue to benefit from this project. M+Archive not only provided an easy migration path for email but added email retention for electronic records preservation and retrieval.
The Bottom Line: M+Archive enabled Texas City ISD to carve costs out of their migration project
The M+Archive implementation has been a good solution for Texas City ISD. The School District IT staff was impressed with the level of technical support they received from the Messaging Architects’ engineers throughout the process. "By using M+Archive for our transition from GroupWise to Exchange, we were able to leverage the dollars we saved by not having to invest into a separate migration tool and we were able to extend the email system refresh beyond the original scope of the project. M+Archive allowed us to meet the need to migrate and enable a deployment policy for centralized email retention and electronic discovery," concludes Shields.
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