Generali Romania, migration from IBM Lotus to Microsoft Exchange

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Generali Romania, email solution migration from IBM Lotus to Microsoft Exchange

12 Sep Generali Romania, email solution migration from IBM Lotus to Microsoft Exchange

Posted at 13:10h in STUDII DE CAZ by Silvia 0 Comments

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Generali Romania has used for a long time the IBM Lotus email solution, managed externally, by the Vienna branch of the group. In 2011, due to the reorganization of the IT infrastructure, Generali Romania took the decision to administer the email solution locally. Moreover, because the IBM solution had a high licensing cost and support was difficult to find, the company replaced Lotus Domino with Microsoft Exchange 2007. In just three weeks, Crescendo and Generali team implemented the Exchange 2007 solution, migrated over 1000 accounts on Exchange 2007 and have integrated 130 mobile BlackBerry users.

Following the project, Generali Romania benefits from increased productivity, especially at the level of new employees and mobile employees, and full control over the email solution, all with the significant reduction in administration and support costs.

About the client

Active on the local market since 2002, Generali Romania, a member of Generali PPF Holding, is the new company resulting in the merger of two major insurers, Generali Asigurari and Ardaf, each with a tradition of almost 20 years on the Romanian insurance market . With a market share of 6.6% (according to CSA data), Generali Romania is the 7th player on the insurance market. The new company has a comprehensive offer of insurance, life and general insurance products, which it distributes through the two distribution networks of Generali Asigurari and Ardaf, which accumulate about 6,500 agents and more than 200 sales units (branches, work points). The long-term vision of the company is to become the most trusted insurer and one of the leaders of the Romanian insurance market.

Initial situation

As part of an international group, by 2011, Generali Romania has benefited of an email solution managed by the Vienna branch, under a wider outsourcing contract for IT services. The changes in the structure that occurred within the company following acquisitions processes led to the reconfiguration of the IT environment. Thus business solutions and IT infrastructure have been migrated to the regional center in Budapest. The IBM Lotus solution was not part of this project, a context in which Generali Romania took the decision to manage the email solution internally and change it. The business case of the migration process involved Lotus retention, similar to other subsidiaries, but the maintenance / licensing costs were relatively high, and the identification of qualified human resources for Lotus management was difficult. At the same time, considering the express management’s requirements to reduce e-mail account activation time for new users, simplifying the administration has become an important goal.

“For continuity in use it would have been easier to keep Lotus, but we looked for companies to configure and manage this solution, both in Romania and Hungary and the Czech Republic, and the costs obtained even after the negotiations were high. On the other hand, the management of the company wanted the activation of the mail accounts, including the mobile ones, to be faster, which required a solution with a simplified administration,” said Narcis Mircea, IT Manager Generali Romania.

Choosing the solution

Generali Romania decided to change the IBM Lotus email solution with Microsoft Exchange 2007 Standard License version to simplify administration and usage, but also reduce administration costs. “The bids received showed that at similar discounts, the licensing and implementation / adoption costs of the Microsoft Exchange solution were lower than IBM Lotus. In addition, the contract with Microsoft also allowed access to other products, such as SharePoint, to develop an Intranet portal,” says Narcis Mircea.

Implementing partner

To migrate the email solution, Generali Romania chose Crescendo, an IT & C integrator with more than 10 years of experience in Microsoft-based projects, including Exchange.

Crescendo’ team has been involved in all stages of the project – from analysis, design to implementation / migration, and has been able to achieve Generali’s performance goals, including the completion of the three-week record.

Project implementation

The solution agreed by Generali was therefore based on an Exchange 2007 architecture with a Disaster Recovery solution. The project started with an analysis and evaluation phase of the existing infrastructure, followed by the design phase for the new Exchange 2007 organization in which: server roles (Mailbox Server, CAS, HUB Transport Server), server distribution, Storage Group and Mailbox Store, as well as user policies, backup policies, etc. Also in this phase have been defined the domains of email, the route of an email, the disaster recovery model.

According to the agreed design, the installation and configuration of the Exchange 2007 solution was subsequently followed, followed by the pilot phase in which the actual migration process was tested. The actual migration lasted less than 2 weeks, in tranches of about 100 email houses per day and was carried out by the IT team of Generali Romania together or with support from Crescendo.

“Because we had very fast storage systems we could have migrated in one step, but we preferred to migrate 100 accounts a day to avoid a sudden change in the organization. However, I noticed that many users were familiar with Microsoft Outlook, and the transition to the new solution was made without any problems. Therefore, distributing a user manual and the existence of a HelpDesk line were sufficient. There was no downtime and no data was lost,” says Narcis Mircea, IT Manager Generali Romania.

As part of the project, integration with the BlackBerry mobile email solution for 130 users has also been carried out, migrating to different versions of the BlackBerry Enterprise Server, but keeping the domain, which meant bringing the devices to the system administrator for back-up and upgrades. Everything went on normally, without the need for RIM support. For Backup and Restore, Microsoft Data Protection Manager was chosen, and for antivirus / antispam security, CISCO IronPort is the solution chosen by Generali Romania and other IT projects. The administration of Microsoft Exchange 2007 was the responsibility of the IT department of Generali Romania, a qualified person was employed in this respect, without being dedicated to 100% of this activity.

Benefits

For Generali Romania, the benefits of migrating to Microsoft Exchange 2007 immediately emerged and reflected on both the core business level and the IT department.

At the operational level, Generali recorded an increase in productivity due to:

Considerably reducing the time of creating email accounts for new users and activating BlackBerry accounts, which is reflected during the entry of a new employee into production. Even if there was an SLA between Generali Romania and the Austrian support center for the Lotus solution, the activation was difficult, and the intervals for each task were high. “It took 5 days to activate a new user: email and BlackBerry account, now with the internalization of the service and with Microsoft Exchange 2007, the whole process takes only 2 hours,” said Narcis Mircea.
Increase mobility through webmail access. Microsoft Exchange 2007 provides users with access to webmail, which offers the ability to check correspondence from any computer connected to the Internet, which is very important for an insurance sales agent who spends a lot of time outside the office. The previous solution required replication of the message storage space and therefore not all employees had access. Moreover, the interface was based on Java and was not accessible on tablets.
Simplifying use as the Microsoft Outlook client has a simple interface known to the most diverse categories of users. Moreover, by native integration with Active Directory, users need to enter a single login password in the system and not two as before. “The likelihood that a new employee in Generali Romania will already have experience with Microsoft Outlook is much higher compared to IBM Lotus,” said Narcis Mircea.

At the IT department level, Generali benefits from:

Increased control of the solution. The internal management of the email solution allows the Generali IT Department to operate the changes and put very quickly in the production of the applications, an element considered essential by the top management of the company.
Simplify email management. Choosing Microsoft Exchange has made it easier to find qualified human resources to manage the solution. Also, by native integration between Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Active Directory, Generali now has a common database of users and workstations. Prior to the Microsoft Exchange implementation, users had to be created both in Lotus and Active Directory, duplicating the information and complicating the administration and management of the solutions. Besides these aspects, back-up and restore features are much easier to access through the Microsoft Data Protection Manager solution, which also provides log information, which was not possible with the previous solution.
Increasing the security level by native encryption of internal messaging traffic, an important aspect of internal collaboration within the organization. A Microsoft Certification Authority has also been implemented to encrypt and sign email messages that circulate within the company. And by purchasing public digital certificates, Generali can send signed or encrypted email messages, an important aspect of Generali Romania’s collaboration with business partners and mandatory in the relationship with the financial-banking institutions.

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Generali Romania, Microsoft Technology

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