Government Success Story - Osceola County Clerks

Osceola County Clerks was looking to migrate to from Novell's Groupwise mail system to Microsoft Exchange in order to fully integrate their mail system with their Active Directory environment. They looked to Big Sur Technologies to help make that happen. Big Sur Technologies performed a Novell to Microsoft Migration Workshop. During this workshop we discussed all aspects of the migration, the outcome of the workshop gave both Big Sur Technologies and Osceola County Clerks office a clear understanding of all of the work that was required to be done. Best of all, it was tailored to the Osceola County Clerks office specific needs: full Active Directory integration, preservation of existing data and upgrading of the domain and client machine software.

Before the actual email system could be migrated, Active Directory had to be redeployed for the entire domain to prepare it for the 2008 environment. Big Sur also oversaw obtaining all of the required 64-bit hardware from IBM.

To process the GroupWise email boxes Big Sur utilized the Quest Migration Tool for Novell GroupWise. Big Sur also introduced 4 "processor" machines to help accelerate migration off of GroupWise. These machines were to perform the physical movement of GroupWise Data from the old system to their new Exchange 2007 system. Non-impact initial migrations were performed following setup for verification. All other accounts were migrated during non-business hours and there was no outage experienced by the employee base. The following business day was very light on questions about the newly introduced Outlook client, mainly due to most people's familiarity with the product or with the similar, newly branded as "Windows Live Mail" client, "Outlook Express". User logins were now consolidated; users no longer had to remember two logins but instead used only their Active Directory login for both network and email access.