Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Siemens Increases Productivity with Common Global Messaging System
Overview
Country or Region:Germany
Industry:Electronics and Electrical Engineering
Customer Profile
With more than 430,000 people in 130 Siemens units in 190 countries, Siemens is one of the world’s largest electronics and electrical engineering companies.
Business Situation
Each Siemens business unit operates separately, yet needs to work with other units to remain competitive and customer focused. This decentralized structure makes it challenging to support collaboration throughout the company.
Solution
Siemens deployed Microsoft® WindowsServer™ 2003, Microsoft ExchangeServer 2003, and Microsoft Office Professional Enterprise Edition 2003.
Benefits
Reduced costs
More scalability, higher reliability
Increased productivity
More-empowered users / “With the release of Windows Server 2003, ExchangeServer 2003, and Outlook 2003, we have a collection of productivity tools that work together like a well-tuned orchestra.”
John Minnick, Manager, Technology Development for Siemens Energy & Automation Unit and SWAT Program Manager
Siemens consists of more than 130 business units that provide innovative technologies and services to customers all over the world. Employees in different units found it difficult to work together effectively using the company’s many unconnected computer systems. To meet this challenge, Siemens launched an initiative to unify its computing infrastructure into a single ActiveDirectory® forest. To deploy the messaging and collaboration resources needed to support this global environment, Siemens used Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 with Active Directory, Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, and Microsoft Office Professional Enterprise Edition 2003 with Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003. The new systems help Siemens reduce the costs of installing, supporting, and managing its messaging environment, while increasing user productivity.
Situation
Siemens, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of electrical and electronic products, employs 430,000 people in 190 countries worldwide. The Siemens global network consists of 130 Siemens units that provide customers with technology solutions in six business segments: Information and Communications, Automation and Control, Power, Transportation, Medical, and Lighting. Each Siemens unit is responsible for its own operations and has the flexibility to make its own decisions and build strong relationships with its customers.
Today, Siemens business units retain their own in-house IT staff to administer and support their computing infrastructures. Siemens units outsource some of their IT functions to Siemens Business Services (SBS), one of the world's leading IT service providers and the company’s central resource for business services. However, the IT departments of the Siemens units are independent organizations that use their own discretion when configuring the network resources they support.
The company’s decentralized messaging infrastructure, which used Microsoft® Exchange Server version 5.5, limited the ability of employees to communicate and collaborate with their colleagues. Employees could not share calendars across Exchange Server 5.5 organizations. They could not see the free/busy status information of workers in other parts of the company to schedule meetings. Company email addresses were stored in a separate database, making it cumbersome to address email messages and manage distribution lists.
Decentralization was just part of the company’s challenge; the lack of an enterprisewide standard for configuring Exchange Server 5.5 sites also created problems. For example, if an emailmessage that contained a file attachment was sent to more than 150 employees at several different Siemens units, the results would vary depending on how each Siemens unit had configured its mail servers. Some of the mail servers might allow the message to go through but remove the attachment as a potential virus threat. Other servers would block the entire message, treating it as spam because it had more than 150 recipients listed. Others would allow both message and attachment through. In addition, the sender would not receive an error message that said who received the message and who did not.
The existence of so many unconnected, non-standardized Exchange Server 5.5 sites made the system unwieldy. System administrators who managed multiple sites needed to connect to and manage each site individually through a separate interface. When users transferred to another Siemens unit, their existing mailboxes were deleted and new ones created.
Although the decentralized, non-standardized IT structure provided flexibility, it did not encourage cooperation among Siemens business units and regions. And cooperation is critical to providing comprehensive, customer-focused products, solutions, and services at competitive prices.
In 1999, Siemens launched a global initiative called the Any4 vision. The goal of the Any4 vision is to ensure that personnel, vendors, suppliers, distributors, partners, and other authorized Siemens users can access network resources from any location—anyone, anywhere, anytime, any resource. A key part of the vision is giving information workers better collaboration tools and more effective ways to communicate. Better collaboration and communication increase business agility and improve employee efficiency while bringing the company closer to its customers.
To accomplish the Any4 vision, Siemens decided to unify its separate IT infrastructures into a single forest so that all areas of the company could share a common directory, schema, configuration, and global catalog. Centralizing services would also reduce operating expenses by lowering the company’s hardware, administrative, and licensing costs. Siemens would need to balance the benefits of a common platform with the needs of individual operating groups.
Siemens formed the Siemens Windows Architecture Team (SWAT) to guide the implementation of this common platform. Composed of members from major business segments within Siemens, SWAT considered how best to take advantage of the company’s Microsoft technology environment. It determined that the existing infrastructure of the Microsoft Windows NT® Server version 4.0 operating system and Exchange Server 5.5 lacked the scalability to support these business initiatives.
“Our goal was the unification of our entire enterprise network,” says Andrew Wolff, Enterprise System Architect for Siemens Business Services U.S. “Any messaging system we installed would have to support about 360,000 users and thousands of system mailboxes, shared mailboxes, distribution lists, and public folders. That's a tall order.”
Solution
To meet the requirements of its Any4 vision and consolidate its separate networks,Siemens used thefollowing components of Microsoft WindowsServerSystem™ integrated server software: Microsoft ExchangeServer 2003 running on the Microsoft WindowsServer™ 2003 operating system with the ActiveDirectory® service.
Initially, the company chose to build its enterprisewide solution by using Microsoft Windows2000AdvancedServer with ActiveDirectory. A single-forest architecture would bring all Siemens business units together under a shared global standard. Microsoft Exchange2000Server would provide messaging services. SWAT developed the design principles and guidelines that all Siemens IT units would use to deploy the new systems.
From mid-1998 through late 1999, SWAT developed an Active Directory design that worked in a distributed environment. At the same time, another group outside SWAT began working with Exchange2000Server and Active Directory to ensure that the architecture of Active Directory would support message exchange and collaboration from the beginning. SWAT created a group within the Siemens global IT department to provide Siemens units with centralized Active Directory support and administration.
Laterin 2000, Siemens started deploying its ActiveDirectory design to a few Siemens units at a time. As the migration progressed, Siemens discovered that the number of sites in its single forest would almost reach the ExchangeServer sites-per-forest limit of Windows2000Server. This limited scalability caused the calculation of the replication topology to take more than an hour andslowed deployment considerably.
However, the scalability issue was resolved in the beta release of WindowsServer 2003 Enterprise Edition. Its Intersite Topology Generator used improved algorithms and could easily scale to support forests with a large number of sites. Initial testing demonstrated that WindowsServer 2003 would meet the single-forest requirements of Siemens.
To help revise its network consolidation plan, Siemens engaged the Microsoft Enterprise Engineering Center. The new plan included WindowsServer 2003, ExchangeServer 2003 communication and collaboration server, and Microsoft Office Professional Enterprise Edition 2003, with the Microsoft OfficeOutlook®2003 messaging and collaboration client.
The scope of the project required Siemens technicians to migrate 150 ExchangeServer 5.5 organizations to the new system. This could potentially have taken years to accomplish. By using the Quest Exchange Migration Wizard to install ExchangeServer 2003 in native mode rather than mixed mode from the beginning, Siemens was able to upgrade 75 percent of its sites to ExchangeServer 2003 in only 18 months. The company thus met critical deadlines and avoided catastrophic consequences for the migration project.
Although the IT staff at each Siemens unit retains primary responsibility for its own messaging system, a new central department—the Central Administration Exchange—administers the global ExchangeServer 2003 organization. Using analysis and management tools, such as the Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer Tool, this department monitors the corporate hub sites and supports the high-level administrative needs of the entire messaging infrastructure.
Benefits
Since Siemens began deploying ExchangeServer 2003 and WindowsServer 2003 at its business units across the world, the company has improved network performance and provided users with better access to messaging resources. The new system increases user productivity and reduces hardware, licensing, and administrative costs.
Increased User Productivity
Outlook 2003 works with ExchangeServer 2003 to help information workers at Siemens get their work done more efficiently. Siemens gains increased productivity through the following features:
Enhanced integration with ExchangeServer 2003 improves the performance of Outlook 2003, and its new user interface makes it easier for information workers to get the most out of their email experience.
An improved Microsoft Office Outlook Web Access interface closely resembles Outlook 2003 andgives users a consistent experience wherever they connect to ExchangeServer.
Added options for mobile access and synchronization help mobile users gain access to their information from a greatly expanded set of devices. The new technology makes it easy for mobile users to stay current with the email messages in their mailboxes.
Improved employee collaboration across geographic and organizational boundaries. The Siemens single-forest infrastructure results in more focused and cost-effective solutions, products, and services. Each Siemens unit maintains its autonomy while benefiting from a shared enterprisewide infrastructure.
“The new Outlook 2003 user interface and network performance is outstanding. We saw immediate improvement in user productivity when we upgraded to Outlook 2003 and Outlook Web Access,” says John Minnick, Manager of Technology Development for Siemens Energy & Automation Unit and SWAT Program Manager.
Better System Reliability
Windows Server System provides a reliable foundation for the company’s infrastructure. “Better performance with WindowsServer 2003 and ExchangeServer 2003 means higher productivity and increased operational efficiency for all Siemens units. These are products that nearly every employee uses,” says Minnick.
Exchange Server 2003 provides reliability advances that help Siemens lower the cost of managing its communications infrastructure and make it easier for IT managers to deliver mission-critical messaging and collaboration services to the global network. The Volume Shadow Copy service enables online backup of storage groups and eliminates the need to take messaging servers offline in order to back up data. Backups that used to take at least four hours now take minutes to perform.
Instantaneous backup and restore removes one of the practical limits to the number of users Siemens can support on a single server computer. The ExchangeServer 2003 client-to-server communication protocol delivers fast, consistent client computer performance across the Siemens network and eliminates the need to install messaging servers at remote offices. Features such as snapshot backup provide Siemens with an assurance of maximum uptime.
Lower Total Cost of Ownership
The ExchangeServer 2003 architecture, along with WindowsServer 2003, provides high-volume, high-availability messaging throughout the company at a low cost. Some studies that survey the costs of messaging systems for companies comparable to Siemens place the average monthly cost for these systems at U.S.$20–$40 per mailbox. Siemens provides users with mailboxes that hold 100 megabytes of data for less than $10 monthly for each mailbox.
The Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer Tool givesSiemens a detailed, comprehensive view of its messaging infrastructure. The Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer displays an inventory of the message servers and their status on a Web page viewed by all the system administrators in the company. This information helps them monitor the status of their servers, spot errors quickly, and analyze overall trends in order to avert potentially costly problems before they occur. “The Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer gives us a visibility into the messaging environment that we simply did not have before. It is a mission-critical tool for us,” says Minnick.
SWAT created a consolidated network infrastructure design that offers ready-made forest-root infrastructures to Siemens business units, lowering the total cost of ownership in several other ways:
Active Directory provides a single, unified enterprise directory for administration of all users, groups, permissions, configuration data, network logon, and file and Web shares.
Centralized administration of email and network resources lowers the total cost for messaging and collaboration.
With just one environment to develop for, train on, and support, Siemens achieves substantial savings in administrative costs and training expenses.
“When we started the architecture planning, we had more than 1,700 ExchangeServer 5.5 servers,” says Minnick. “Today, we have slightly less than 500 ExchangeServer 2003 servers—nearly a 30 percent reduction. That’s progress.”
More-Empowered Information Workers
Enhancements in how ExchangeServer 2003 and Outlook 2003 work together have dramatically improved the performance of messaging software on the company’s network. Siemens employees who frequently travel report that checking their email from a hotel room, using Outlook 2003 with a dial-up connection, provides the same level of performance they get while working at their computer in the office. The Cached Exchange Mode feature in Outlook 2003 automatically adjusts the program to accommodate slower network connections. Also, the RPC over HTTP feature enables users to connect to ExchangeServer 2003 without first having to connect to a virtual private network when they are outside the corporate firewall.
“With the release of Windows Server 2003, Exchange Server 2003, and Outlook 2003, we have a collection of productivity tools that work together like a well-tuned orchestra. The results of this migration should be a very exciting time for our company,” says Minnick.
Microsoft Windows Server System
Microsoft Windows Server System is a line of integrated and manageable server software designed to reduce the complexity and cost of IT. Windows Server System enables you to spend less time and budget on managing your systems so that you can focus your resources on other priorities for you and your business.
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