Customer Solution Case Study
/ / IT Firm Expects to Cut Costs by 30 to 35 Percent with New Messaging Solution
Overview
Country or Region:France
Industry: Professional Services
Customer Profile
Headquartered in Paris, Capgemini provides consulting, technology, and outsourcing services. The company reported 2004 global revenue of €6.3 billion.
Business Situation
Capgemini Benelux, a division that includes about 8,000 employees in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, used Novell GroupWise 6.0 as its messaging solution. The system required costly and time-consuming administration.
Solution
Capgemini Benelux moved from GroupWise to Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003 and Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003. The solution currently supports 8,000 mailboxes and approximately 50,000 e-mail contacts.
Benefits
Saves 30 to 35 percent in costs per mailbox per year
Simplifies server administration
Increases employee productivity
Provides mobile access / “By moving from Novell GroupWise to Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, we now have a messaging system that is less expensive and easier to use.”
Elmar van de Brug, Project Leader, Capgemini Benelux
Capgemini is a professional services firm that provides consulting, technology, and outsourcing services for customers around the world. Capgemini Benelux, a division of Capgemini, wanted to standardize on Microsoft® technologies for all its IT systems. As part of that project, Capgemini Benelux migrated its messaging solution from Novell GroupWise 6.0 to Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 and Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003. As a result, the company has significantly reduced the time spent on IT administration. Employees have increased their productivity because of the new solution’s improved uptime, performance, and usability. The solution has also made it possible for Capgemini to provide access to corporate e-mail on devices running Microsoft Windows MobileTM2003 software for Pocket PCs. With the new solution, Capgemini estimates that it will save 30 to 35 percent in costs per mailbox per year.
Situation
Founded in 1967, Capgemini provides a range of services in the areas of consulting, technology, and outsourcing. The company uses an approach it calls the “Collaborative Business Experience,” which is designed to help customers achieve better, faster, and more sustainable results. Based in Paris, Capgemini employs approximately 55,000 people in more than 30 countriesworldwide.
Capgemini Benelux, a division of Capgemini that includes Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, used a variety of Novell, Oracle, and Microsoft® solutions for its IT systems. The company’s messaging solution, Novell GroupWise 6.0, was costly and time-consuming to manage. For example, IT administrators, who also provide technology services for Capgemini customers, dedicated an extensive amount of time backing up and restoring mailboxes. Administrators spent approximately eight hours on each mailbox they had to restore when they could have used that time to work on revenue-generating customer projects.
In addition, many employees used Microsoft®Outlook® Express or a third party client based on Post Office Protocol 3 (POP3) because they preferred that to the GroupWise Web e-mail client. However, the POP3 e-mail service was unstable. Slow overall system performance, which was due mainly to outdated hardware, and system downtime related to updating and upgrading also hindered employee productivity. “The downtime of GroupWise through this interface was noticeable for everyday users,” says Cees de Kuijer, Infrastructure Manager, Capgemini Benelux. Also, the GroupWise client had poor integration with other software, for example Microsoft Office and Acrobat Reader.
And because of the company’s limited disk resources, Capgemini purged e-mail messages every 40 days. As a result, employees had to archive the information on their portable computers. “Employees had to make a local archive, which took time away from their work and was hard to manage,” says Elmar van de Brug, Project Leader at Capgemini Benelux. “And some people would forget to do it, so they lost their e-mail messages when they got purged.”
Capgemini was also facing the expiration of its GroupWise licenses. At the same time, the company wanted both to reduce the costs and to ease the management of all its IT systems.
Solution
Capgemini Benelux decided to standardize on Microsoft® technologies. The company chose Microsoft as its sole software provider because Microsoft offered a complete, integrated solution that could be used for all the company’s IT systems. As part of that migration project, Capgemini moved from GroupWise to Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 communication and collaboration server and the Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003 messaging and collaboration client.
“Microsoft technologies integrate the tools and services we use at Capgemini. Now we communicate with our colleagues from one central point,” says de Kuijer.
The migration took nearly a year to complete, starting with preliminary inquiries into the technologies in August 2003 and ending with the migration of users’ local archives in June and July 2004.
Capgemini began the project’s design and testing phase in October 2003, and the company started a pilot in April 2004. In the pilot, Capgemini first migrated 100 mailboxes to Exchange Server 2003 and then gradually increased that number to 300 mailboxes. During the pilot phase, Exchange Server 2003 interoperated with GroupWise. Employees were able to interact with each other and with others outside the company using GroupWise and Exchange Server. To synchronize contacts between the two systems, Capgemini used Exchange Server tools including Calendar Connector. And the company used an internally developed script to create user accounts. Because the pilot was successful, Capgemini then planned a full-scale migration.
In May 2004, the company moved the remaining 8,000 mailboxes during a single weekend, using the GroupWise Migrator for Exchange from Microsoft partner Wingra Technologies. Capgemini created a CD that employees used to migrate their local archives to personal folders on Outlook themselves. The CD contained scripts that Capgemini developed, using the Microsoft Visual Basic® version 6.0 development system, to automate most of the migration process. Capgemini completed the archive migration by converting e-mail folders, address books, and calendars using UniAccess from ComAxis Technology.
The integration between Exchange Server 2003 and third-party products aided the implementation. “I would not hesitate to use third-party tools for future projects because they proved to save a lot of time and effort,” says Danny den Hartog, Lead Architect at Capgemini Benelux.
Located at a Capgemini data center in Utrecht, the Netherlands, the solution serves about 8,000 mailboxes, each with an average size of 100 megabytes. Capgemini uses Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 1 running on the Microsoft Windows ServerTM 2003 operating system, the foundation of Microsoft Windows Server SystemTM integrated server software.
Microsoft Clustering Services helps improve solution uptime. The solution also provides mailbox access over the Internet for users with Microsoft Office Outlook Web Access, Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), and POP3 e-mail clients. “Before, servers had to be taken offline for maintenance purposes. Because we implemented a four-node Windows Server 2003 cluster, maintenance like updating involves minimal downtime. It’s barely noticeable for end users using the cached Outlook 2003 client,” den Hartog says.
In addition, Capgemini uses a directory service that it developed in-house, synchronizing directory information on a regular basis with the Active Directory® service, a component of Windows Server 2003. Capgemini also migrated its e-mail storage servers to a more scalable solution—an EMC storage area network (SAN).
To help employees learn to use the new solution, Capgemini offered Web-based training. Many employees opted instead to learn Outlook 2003 by working with it on a daily basis, van de Brug says. The company also provided training to IT staff through presentations and the Capgemini intranet.
Benefits
Capgemini expects to significantly reduce IT costs because of the migration from GroupWise to Exchange Server 2003 and Outlook 2003. The new solution has reduced the time spent on server administration, and it has improved the productivity of Capgemini employees. “By moving from Novell GroupWise to Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, we now have a messaging system that is less expensive and easier to use,” van de Brug says.
Saves 30 to 35 Percent Annually in IT Costs
Capgemini estimates that it will save 30 to 35 percent per year for each mailbox. A large part of the savings comes from the reduction in system administration costs.
Capgemini now has a simpler messaging structure to manage. The company has moved from six GroupWise mailbox server computers to a cluster of four mailbox server computers running Exchange Server 2003. While Capgemini needed GroupWise specialists to manage the GroupWise system, the company can use its many experienced Microsoft administrators to manage the Exchange Server 2003 solution.
By migrating from dedicated storage servers to a single, easier-to-manage SAN, Capgemini has also reduced the cost per megabyte of storage. In addition, the company has cut costs through the timesaving management features of Exchange Server 2003.
Simplifies Server Administration
Capgemini has significantly reduced the time needed for daily system administration. With the GroupWise solution, Capgemini managed its server computers individually. By using the seamless integration between Exchange Server 2003 and Active Directory, the company now can manage all servers in the Exchange Server 2003 solution as if they were one entity. For example, Capgemini has automated the creation of mailboxes by using the company’s in-house directory service and its synchronization with Active Directory. As a result, user identifications and mailboxes are created, modified, and disabled in seconds. By comparison, the creation of a GroupWise mailbox involved several steps and took about half an hour.
The Recovery Storage Group feature in Exchange Server 2003 also speeds management tasks. It took Capgemini one day to restore a single mailbox with GroupWise, while the same task takes two hours with Exchange Server 2003. By using the Recovery Storage Group feature, IT administrators can place a copy of a mailbox database on an existing server computer. “We don’t have to build an entirely different server and then extract mailboxes like we did with GroupWise, so it has become very easy to restore mailboxes,” den Hartog says.
As a result of the time savings, the company’s IT staff can spend more time on work for Capgemini customers. “The new Exchange Server 2003 system is part of our Microsoft strategy, enhancing user support and resulting in a better total cost of ownership,” de Kuijer says.
Increases Employee Productivity
Capgemini employees are more productive because Exchange Server 2003 provides faster performance and better ease of use. Also, since Capgemini implemented Exchange Server 2003 in May 2004, the system has had zero unplanned downtime.
With the new Cached Exchange Mode feature, employees work from mailbox copies stored on their local computers. This improves performance by reducing the number of data requests sent to the server computer. Employees also gain a seamless messaging experience; they can switch between different connections—local area network, remote, and offline—without changing settings or restarting Outlook 2003.
Outlook 2003 also makes it easier for employees to complete common tasks. To schedule a meeting, a user can quickly access multiple calendars without having to open multiple mailboxes as required with GroupWise. In addition, Outlook Web Access provides mobile users with advanced features, such as spelling checker and task management, which closely match those of Outlook 2003. According to den Hartog, the interface is also easier to use than the GroupWise Web-based client.
Capgemini is considering implementing a new Exchange Server 2003 feature to help remote workers access their messaging information over the Internet. With remote procedure call (RPC) over Hypertext Transfer Protocol over Secure Sockets Layer, employees will be able to securely synchronize Outlook 2003 and Exchange Server 2003 through corporate firewalls.
Provides Mobile Access
A growing number of Capgemini employees are now able to access and synchronize their e-mail from mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs). With built-in ActiveSync® technology and Microsoft Office Outlook Mobile Access, Exchange Server 2003 provides access to e-mail, calendaring, contacts, and tasks on a range of mobile devices.
Capgemini is running a pilot with about 90 employees using devices based on Microsoft Windows MobileTM2003 software for Pocket PCs, and 300 more employees are using Exchange Server 2003 with their own Windows Mobile-based devices. “Our mobile workers can get their work done more easily because they can access their e-mail at any time and from any place,” de Kuijer says. “That wasn’t possible before.”
Microsoft Windows Server System
Microsoft Windows Server System integrated server infrastructure software is designed to support end-to-end solutions built on the Windows Server operating system. Windows Server System creates an infrastructure based on integrated innovation, Microsoft's holistic approach to building products and solutions that are intrinsically designed to work together and interact seamlessly with other data and applications across your IT environment. This helps you reduce the costs of ongoing operations, deliver a more secure and reliable IT infrastructure, and drive valuable new capabilities for the future growth of your business.
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