Electronic Messaging System

Background

The client is one of the market leaders in the interior decoration materials distribution and retail in Romania.
With a retail stores chain throughout the country and owning several regional storage sites , the client needed a reliable electronic messaging system with collaboration features between users and easy access to mobile users.

Problem Definition

Client was previously using a free email solution with no collaboration capabilities and without desired access for mobile users using smartphone devices .

Although the client had implemented a MS ADS-based solution in the headquarters, the email solution was not integrated into this.

The existing email solution based on freeware software lacked support from developers , which often lead to long periods of downtime whenever a problem occurred.

The client needed a solution to eliminate the shortcomings of the existing one:

• overloading the IT support team for user authentication management
• lacking a global user information catalogue
• lacking a shared calendar

Customer requirements and solution

The chosen solution was supposed to meet the following requirements:

• AD integrated email authentication
• the existence of a global user information catalogue
• easy and familiar access to email through various methods – POP3 , IMAP , webmail – and best use of the features within MS Outlook
• easy email access of mobile users using laptops and smartphones
• the use BlackBerry terminals
• last but not least , the chosen solution was expected to have the developer’s technical support

Our solution, covering all customer requirements, has been implementing an electronic messaging system based on MS Exchange 2007 combined with BlackBerry Professional Software.

Challenges

As with any project of this kind, there were some more complex steps :

• AD Preparation for MS Exchange environment integration . MS Exchange 2007 operation requires the existence of MS ADS functional and healthy environment . Ever since the implementation of MS
• Exchange preparatory phase we realized that we were dealing with an environment suffering ADS replication errors between controllers . So our first task was to simplify the AD infrastructure and to troubleshoot the synchronization between domain controllers.
• Preparing email migration and users on the new email server. As the old email solution was integrated into AD , there were differences between the existing email accounts and the AD users, issues that were supposed to be addressed before the migration started.
• Mailboxes’ content migration on the new email server. This operation has been done in a single step. Data transfer time required special attention, as a maintenance window had been clearly defined by the customer.

Conclusions

The migration to the new messaging solution of PIRITEX SA improved the overall email availability and brought new ways to enable better collaboration between mobile users.