Background
Located in Plattsburgh, New York, Champlain Valley Physicians
Hospital Medical Center (CVPH) is a regional medical center
recognized as a leader in providing exceptional quality care and
improving health and wellness of North Country residents.
Champlain Valley Physicians Hospital was created in 1972 by
the merger of the private Physician's Hospital with Champlain
Valley Hospital, a charitable hospital operated by the Grey
Nuns. As CVPH Medical Center, it is currently a not-for-profit
facility incorporating a variety of inpatient, outpatient, and
community outreach care services.
Founded in 1995, Messaging Architects is a global builder of
Business Drive Email™. For over a decade, our team of
professional technologists has provided remarkable software
and services that deliver 100% uptime and compliance for
millions of end users.
Business Challenge
In the spring of 2010, CVPH decided to replace its Novell
GroupWise email system with Microsoft Exchange 2007. Citing
the lack of GroupWise integration with critical applications and
a lack of confidence in Novell’s future, the IT team at CVPH
began evaluating the migration tools on the market.
Email is a critical business application for CVPH, whose email
users have come to rely on it as an essential part of day-to-day
communications at the hospital. Initially CVPH contemplated
performing a phased approach to the migration by keeping
both GroupWise and Exchange in place. “Co-existence
definitely caught our attention because we were hesitant to
move over. Moving from a familiar GroupWise system to an
unfamiliar Exchange system was going to introduce an
enormous amount of change to the user community at CVPH
and we wanted to make sure we did it right. In the end,
co-existence wasn’t a good solution for us,” says Justin Miller,
the Senior Network Specialist at CVPH.
“We considered the Quest tool, but at the end of
the migration, you just threw the tool away.
You paid all that money just to migrate. With Netmail Migrator and Netmail Archive, we quickly realized that after the
migration we were going to have an
enterprise-level email archiving solution in place,
and email archiving was definitely another project
on our IT to-do list. What’s more, the cost of the
two products was comparable," says Robert Evans, Telecommunications and Operations Manager at CVPH.
The Netmail Archive Email Archiving and Migration Solution
The GroupWise system at CVPH was extremely bloated.
There were email accounts that weren’t being archived and
numerous personal archives scattered throughout the system.
With the help of the Messaging Architects’ Professional Services
Team, Netmail Archive was deployed to move the bulk of email
messages and associated data out of GroupWise and into a
centralized archiving system where the messages would be
accessible through WebAccess. Netmail Archive was also deployed on
the new Exchange system to allow users to access archived
messages from their Outlook clients. Netmail Archive was used to
locate personal archives and transfer them into the centralized
archiving system without having to convert them to Outlook PST
files, which resulted in significant time savings for CVPH. Finally,
instead of simply transferring the archived data into the new
Exchange environment, a subset of data was injected and email
retention policies were implemented to prevent the new system
from becoming bloated in the future.
Having completed the archiving process, the migration from
GroupWise to Exchange took place over a weekend.
“We set aside a few days of preparation before the go-live date,
but it was pretty transparent to our user community, who are still
talking about it. Even our CEO praised the migration as being
seamless,” says Evans.
The Importance of Preparation, Communication and Training
Critical to the success of CVPH’s migration project was the
preparation, communication, and training provided by Evans and
his team. Communication between CVPH’s internal team and the
hospital community was extremely important to the success of the
project, as was the adoption of the new email system by the user
community. To ensure that success, one of the first things they did
was move the IT team to Exchange. Coming from a GroupWise
background, Exchange was not very familiar to the team, but once
everyone in IT was on Exchange, they implemented a full training
schedule and customized the training materials provided by
Messaging Architects to suit the hospital’s environment.
“At first, I was doing weekly communications and then two to three
times weekly communications containing any significant
information or training that needed to go out to the teams.
I over-conveyed the message that life at CVPH was going to
change, so much so that our users bought into it. I made it a much
bigger deal than it probably ended up being,” recalls Miller, the
Senior Network Specialist at CVPH. But it worked. The training
sessions were very well-attended. “Once people understood the
value of the training sessions, we were getting twenty to thirty
people per session.”
The Bottom Line
The Netmail Archive email archiving and migration
solution provided by Messaging Architects was the
right solution for CVPH. “In the end, implementing the
archiving component for the migration was one of the
best decisions we made. We really wanted to migrate
away from GroupWise, and when we found out that
we could use an archiving solution to migrate, we saw
enormous value in that. This project was a really big
win for the team here at CVPH because it is working
exactly like we said it would," says Robert Evans, Telecommunications and Operations Manager, Champlain Valley Physicians Hospital Medical Center.
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