After merging two companies, the newly formed Høyer Finseth used Micro Focus® Retain™ Email to migrate data from its GroupWise® system to Microsoft Exchange.
Overview
Høyer Finseth is a Norwegian company focusing on building, engineering, and consulting. The main office of the organization is located in Oslo. Besides this main office, the company has subsidiaries in Revetal, Råde, and Ålesund. With a high level of technical expertise, Høyer Finseth is able to assist customers during the complete building process.
In December 2016 Høyer Finseth was purchased by WSP Global Inc, an international engineering consultancy, but continues to operate independently.
Challenge
In 2012 the two companies A.L. Høyer AS and Finseth Rådgivende Ingeniører AS merged and became Høyer Finseth AS. The merger increased the competitiveness of the organisation, but it also resulted in some challenges regarding the IT Infrastructure of the company.
Since one of the original companies was using Micro Focus GroupWise and the other one Microsoft Exchange, it was the goal to unify the two mail servers. The company decided to use Microsoft Exchange 2010 as the company-wide mail server platform.
Solution
With the help of Retain Email, Høyer Finseth was able to move GroupWise data into the new common Exchange system as well as archiving the old Exchange data at the same time. The company archived all data initially and then only migrated parts of data depending on its age and the size.
This procedure enabled the company to reduce the amount of data in the live mailbox store drastically and to start with a clean Exchange 2010 system. Since the organisation had no archiving solution in place before the migration, this issue could be solved, too. The archiving capabilities of Retain Email include comprehensive eDiscovery tools and technologies such as deduplication, which reduces the storage costs for the organization.
Since Høyer Finseth wanted the risk of user downtimes as small as possible, it was important for the organisation to test the migration. Patrick Frontéri, Senior Consultant at Frontéri Network Consulting, was in charge of planning, installing, configuring, archiving, and testing the migration process. When handling problems, Frontéri was directly supported by the Micro Focus support and development team.
Results
Terje Gunnarsen, responsible for the IT at Høyer Finseth, explains
“The GWAVA (now part of Micro Focus) team put a lot of effort into solving our problems.”
Some initial problems occurred due to the initial situation of having two different platforms. This complicated the migration of address books and shared folders.
After testing the migration several times and solving these remaining issues, the migration itself only took one single weekend. Even though Gunnarsen and his IT department were confronted with some smaller challenges during the migration process, he was very satisfied with the result:
“Retain helped us to merge two mail systems and now functions as an archiving solution, which enables us to control the size of our Exchange system.”
Today, Retain Email is archiving all communication in Exchange, including public folders. So we can be sure to have records of all of our electronic communication with our partners and customers. This is very important to us as we conduct hundreds of projects each year.
Retain Email is integrated with the Outlook client and the Outlook Web Access, which enables all users to quickly open their archives. Gunnarsen explains.
“The good thing about Retain Email is that if users don’t find what they are looking for in Outlook, they can easily search for it in Retain—no matter if it originally was data from A.L. Høyer AS or Finseth Rådgivende Ingeniører AS”
This article was first published in OHM Issue 38 (2017/3), p25.