Customer Solution Case Study
/ Transit Agency Saves $50,000 Over Three Years with Cloud-Based Email Service
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Government—State and local
Customer Profile
Sound Transit was formed by the Snohomish, King, and Pierce County Councils in Washington State to operate express bus, commuter rail, and light rail services. It has 1,400 employees and contractors.
Business Situation
The on-premises email solution at Sound Transit was expensive to maintain. It needed a better email archiving solution to comply with state retention and eDiscovery policies governing email.
Solution
Sound Transit chose the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite for cloud-based email services and Microsoft Exchange Hosted Archive to facilitate eDiscovery and disclosure requests for email.
Benefits
· Reduced IT costs
· Improved employee productivity
· Simplified email retention for eDiscovery / “We want to focus on more strategic technology projects that contribute to building safe, affordable transit systems. By using Exchange Online, we can focus resources on supporting transportation services.”
Sue Robbins, Project Manager, IT Project Management Office, Sound Transit
To make progress on its plans to expand mass transit and light rail service in the Seattle/Central Puget Sound Region, Sound Transit wanted to reallocate IT resources away from commodity services, such as email and email storage. Also, it needed an email archiving solution to assist in compliance with state regulations for retention and public discovery. Sound Transit subscribed to the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite for cloud-based email and archiving solutions and estimates it will save approximately U.S.$50,000 over the next three years by retiring servers and reducing administrative overhead. And with the archiving solution, the legal department can now more easily store, search, and retrieve email messages.
Situation
Commonly known as Sound Transit, the Central Puget Sound Regional Transit Authority in Washington State has been helping the 2.7 million residents of the Snohomish, King, and Pierce counties get around without cars since 1999. Working in partnership with local transit authorities, Sound Transit plans, builds, and operates safe and reliable regional light rail, commuter trains, and an express bus service. Its revenue comes mainly from sales taxes on purchases made within its district, and from motor vehicle excise taxes. Sound Transit is governed by an 18-member board of directors who are mostly local mayors and city and county council members.
The 45-member IT division at Sound Transit has jurisdiction over the technology required to run the transit systems themselves, including customer-focused services such as providing Wi-Fi Internet connectivity on busses and commuter trains, and installing closed-circuit video cameras and ticket vending machines at stations. Internally, several IT teams are also responsible for infrastructure, business applications, data systems, and productivity tools for employees and contractors. Of these tools and services, email is an essential commodity service for Sound Transit employees. “Email is almost the sole source of communication that we use,” says Sue Robbins, Project Manager, IT Project Management Office at Sound Transit. “There are some employees here that run almost all of their daily work from Microsoft Outlook.”
Sound Transit had been using an on-premises Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 messaging and collaboration solution with more than 1,600 mailboxes. The system ran on four aging servers in the company’s data center. A fifth server hosted an antimalware solution called IronPort and the Exchange Server databases—2.5 terabytes—were backed up to a disk backup appliance.
“We didn’t have a mailbox quota or a standardized data storage strategy around our email content,” says Robbins. “Some staff members had inboxes of more than 10 gigabytes, and many employees managed their email by storing their email messages in .pst [personal storage tables] files in various locations and formats.”
This was not an ideal situation for the legal department at Sound Transit, which is required to comply with Washington State’s requirements for public disclosure. The department needed a clearer methodology for recovering emails, including a way to comprehensively search the agency’s massive email stores that resided within the Exchange Server database backup or in employees’ mailboxes. To answer the needs of the legal department, Sound Transit had begun looking at third-party eDiscovery solutions.
At the same time, the IT division began to take a closer look at how it handled email and other commodity services, especially because the servers were nearing the end of their lives. “We were running into performance issues. Employees had problems managing their large mailboxes and there were storage issues with .pst files that generated user support calls,” says Garv Nayyar, IT Manager at Sound Transit. “It took too much time to administer the Exchange environment, and to perform backups and troubleshoot when the system went down. Our Exchange administrator who supports the data center infrastructure at Sound Transit probably spent 80 percent of his time on email-related tasks.”
The IT division had already begun thinking about ways to simplify email management when the current Chief Information Officer (CIO), Michel Danon, joined Sound Transit at the beginning of 2009. Sensitive to the fact that the agency was taking on more large capital projects, he encouraged the IT division to think about alternative ways to acquire and use technology. In fact, following a period of capital expansion at Sound Transit with the launch of its light rail system, the IT division anticipates a tightening budget over the next few years. Given this context, Sound Transit needed to solve its email, archiving, and eDiscovery challenges in a way that would save time and money for the IT division.
“Our new CIO wanted to refocus IT resources on more strategic projects than managing email,” says Robbins. “He is a big proponent of saving resources by evaluating hosted solutions and he gave us some direction about how we should look for new messaging tools. So we began to investigate cloud-based email services.”
Solution
In early 2010, after comparing Microsoft Online Services and Google Apps for Business, Sound Transit chose the Microsoft offering, called Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite. Sound Transit can take advantage of a low-cost per-user, per-month subscription to access Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Office Communications Online, and Microsoft Office Live Meeting over the Internet—without investing in software licenses or hardware support. Today, Business Productivity Online is no longer available for purchase; Microsoft now offers access to cloud-based productivity tools through Office 365. Sound Transit will be automatically migrated to the new version.
As a first step, Sound Transit subscribed to Exchange Online, however, it can take advantage of the other services at a later date. “We chose Microsoft cloud-based email over a Google solution because our key goal for the migration was to minimize disruption for the end user,” says Nayyar. “Everyone here is used to the Office Outlook email client. If we had to switch to Google, we would lose a lot of functionality with regard to calendaring, managing mailboxes, and scheduling appointments.”
“We have a good relationship with Microsoft,” adds Robbins. “We had been asking them a lot of questions about email and eDiscovery, and they demonstrated an understanding of both our business pains and our goals for a solution. We chose Microsoft also because their online services offered an email archive capability that integrates seamlessly with our environment. The fact that Exchange Online has support for BlackBerry devices was also a bonus.”
In May 2010, Sound Transit subscribed to 1,100 seats of Exchange Online, which offers Microsoft Outlook 2010 with a 25-gigabyte (GB) mailbox for each employee, browser-based Outlook Web Access, and built-in 99.9 percent scheduled uptime with financially-backed service level agreements. With the solution, Microsoft takes care of the setup, ongoing maintenance, and upgrades of the Exchange Server infrastructure. Sound Transit also subscribed to Microsoft Exchange Hosted Archive to help its legal department facilitate discovery with a less intensive manual search for email that is responsive to specific request parameters.
Next, Sound Transit began to prepare the agency for change. “For many government organizations, change management can be a challenge,” says Robbins. “We needed to involve a lot of stakeholders, and we learned that it’s very important to understand how our business stakeholders use email and how moving to the cloud may affect them. This includes how we support the creation of mailboxes, how we use voicemail, and how much mail to migrate to the cloud at a time. In the end, the actual implementation went very smoothly, but to get to that stage was slow and steady.”
Just prior to the migration in January 2011, the Sound Transit IT division ran two pilot projects: one with the IT staff and one with a group of “super users” who were able to manage an email coexistence scenario (where both on-premises and cloud-based email solutions are running in parallel) while the IT staff learned how the service worked.
Prior to the migration, IT staffers used Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 to deploy the Microsoft Online Services Sign In application on each subscriber’s computer, so that employees could access any Microsoft Online Service with the same password. “We used Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to push new passwords out to all users and created an FAQ [frequently asked questions] about how to log on to the new service,” says Robbins.
The migration itself took place during a single weekend in January 2011. Sound Transit took advantage of the Microsoft Directory Synchronization tool to synchronize Sound Transit on-premises Active Directory Domain Services with Exchange Online. The tool collects all valid e-mail addresses from the Sound Transit Active Directory and shares these addresses with Exchange Online. Sound Transit IT staffers can use the tool to manage employees’ user accounts in the familiar on-site Active Directory environment.
“The Directory Synchronization tool helped streamline account provisioning. We used a third-party tool from Migration Wiz to migrate the mailbox data,” says Frank Kirk, Senior Systems Engineer at Sound Transit. “We decided to migrate everyone’s mailboxes over the weekend, beginning with the last 90 days of email for every employee. This amounted to 250 gigabytes of data. When everyone came in on Monday morning, they could start working with their current data. The following week, we migrated the rest of their email messages. By the end of January, we had migrated an additional 400 gigabytes of data and everyone had all their email.”
Sound Transit now is working with Microsoft Services to consolidate and migrate archived data from the Exchange Server database and old email messages from employees’ mailboxes to Exchange Hosted Archive. Sound Transit expects that the legal department will see the full benefits of archived email exponentially as the system continues to archive email over the life of Sound Transit’s capital projects.
Benefits
The IT division at Sound Transit has already experienced the cost savings and increased efficiencies of replacing an on-premises infrastructure with a cloud-based service. Choosing Exchange Online is the first move to the cloud for Sound Transit and opens the door to deploying more cloud-based services, in accordance with the wishes of the CIO.
“Our move to Microsoft cloud-based email reflects the strategy of our CIO,” says Robbins. “Instead of spending time and money on commodity email services and legacy on-premises solutions, we want to focus on more strategic technology projects that contribute to building safe, affordable transit systems. By using Exchange Online, we can focus resources on supporting transportation services.”
Sound Transit is using the move to Microsoft cloud-based services to save money, increase employee productivity, and build a corporate strategy to archive email for eDiscovery.
Reduced IT Costs
Before subscribing to Exchange Online, Sound Transit was facing a hardware upgrade for the five servers that hosted its on-premises Exchange Server 2007 implementation. It was paying for three terabytes of storage for email, and for a backup appliance. Now it can avoid these costs. “We did an evaluation of the return on investment for this project, adding up what we would save by going to the cloud and it is approximately [U.S.]$50,000 over three years,” says Robbins. “This includes paying for software, hardware, and ongoing maintenance costs.”
Improved Employee Productivity
Employees are working more productively, with one staff member saving 80 percent of his time on daily email maintenance. Instead, he can focus his energies on IT projects that support the transit agency’s core business.
With 99.9 percent guaranteed uptime, Robbins is optimistic that in the long run employees will benefit from increased uptime. She also expects reduced support calls. “People used to save all their email messages and file them away in intricate structures, so that just finding things and managing their inboxes became difficult,” says Robbins. “Now that we are building an archiving solution, our hope is that they won’t feel the need to save everything themselves, and I think it’s going to improve a lot of people’s daily productivity.”
Simplified Email Retention for eDiscovery
Sound Transit will be able to more quickly and easily satisfy state retention requirements for eDiscovery and public disclosure using Exchange Hosted Archive, which interoperates with Exchange Online for a complete messaging solution in the cloud.
“As our archive grows and we consolidate our historical data, our legal department will have the ability to store, search, and retrieve email much more easily than before,” concludes Robbins.
Microsoft Online Services