Bell Canada
Bell Canada Unifies its Email Experience by Migrating from Netscape to Exchange Server 2003
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Company Overview
Bell Canada is Canada’s national leader in communications, offering products and services that simplify and improve productivity for its customers’ lives. From its offices nationwide, Bell Canada provides local telephone, long distance, wireless communications, Internet access, data, satellite television and other services to residential and business customers through its 27 million customer connections.
Business Challenge
Faced with a workforce dispersed across multiple offices, Bell Canada needed to upgrade to a consistent email solution that would not only improve inter-office communication but keep mobile users connected to the corporate network. The company had disparate email platforms, with the majority of users on Netscape Communicator and the rest on Microsoft® Outlook messaging and collaboration client. Bell also needed to migrate from Windows® NT 4.0 Server to a modern server operating system.
“We were one of the few corporations running an enterprise email system on Netscape service, which made it increasingly difficult to get resources and support when things went awry,” says Gary Ducharme, associate director, enterprise infrastructure, Bell Canada.
With approximately 35,000 desktop and laptop users, plus countless handheld devices, Bell Canada needed a reliable, common email platform to enable workers to collaborate across the organization, and receive email anywhere, at any time. Bell employees relied heavily on the use of phone calls and email for inter-office communications, but lacked an efficient means to check people’s availability so that meetings could be scheduled easily.
“When we initially evaluated our email system, it became obvious that Netscape Communicator wasn’t meeting the business requirements of our employees,” says Ducharme. “We were actually getting requests from employees to migrate from the Netscape mail service to Outlook 2003 because they wanted the calendaring capabilities, the contact capabilities and all those good things Outlook brings to the table.”
To complicate matters, Bell was running its email systems on two different servers: Microsoft® Exchange Server 5.5 and Sun One Application Server. “Bell had many different mail systems being managed by different operations teams so the whole idea of consolidating onto the Exchange Server 2003 platform just made sense,” says Greg Springings, senior consultant, Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) Toronto. “Bell wanted to give all its employees the same emailing experience and reduce the overhead of having all the operations teams do what was essentially the same job.”
The Netscape platform was architected as a 98 per cent-available infrastructure service, which was fine at the time Bell first installed it. “When we initially deployed the system, we didn’t think of email as a critical service,” says Ducharme. “We had 36,000-odd Netscape users so everyone thought 30 megabytes was a large enough mail size and 98 per cent availability was fine. Now if email is down for even a few seconds, people panic. So when we redesigned our new email system, we designed for higher availability.”
Bell faced two choices: either move to a Microsoft Exchange Server platform with the many capabilities Microsoft Outlook offers or continue with the Sun One Application Server and integrate the capabilities it required into Netscape Communicator.
“The decision boiled down to integrating services such as calendaring and contacts into the Netscape system or going with Microsoft Outlook, which already integrated those features,” says Ducharme. “In our opinion, although the Microsoft solution looked a touch more expensive than the Sun offering, we believed that the integration challenges probably would have made the other proposal more expensive for Bell Canada to operate in the long run.”
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Solution
After reviewing its options, Bell Canada enlisted the aid of Microsoft Consulting Services and trusted partner CGI to modernize its email system and simplify the Bell user experience. Together, the team began migrating from Windows NT 4.0 Server and Exchange 5.5 to Microsoft Windows Server™ 2000 operating system, Microsoft Active Directory® directory service and Microsoft Exchange Server 2000 but midway through the deployment process, Microsoft released upgrades to the server platforms. Seeing the opportunity to increase its emailing capabilities at minimal cost, Bell rolled out Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 operating system, Microsoft Outlook® 2003 messaging and collaboration client and Microsoft Exchange Server 2003.
With Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft Outlook 2003, Bell was able to consolidate the company’s disparate infrastructures. Windows Server 2003 also helped Bell to establish a more secure infrastructure that allows administrators to quickly build connected solutions and enables enhanced communication and collaboration. Along with Windows Server 2003, Bell installed Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1), which provides enhanced performance, greater reliability and more robust security. Furthermore, Bell deployed Active Directory, giving users the ability to log in to a single company domain.
“One of the main challenges for Bell Canada was minimizing the number of logins people had,” says Ducharme. “Because Active Directory integrates with Exchange 2003, we've been able to provide a simpler login for our employees.”
Bell modernized its aging messaging and collaboration servers to Exchange Server 2003, providing higher availability and advanced messaging features that meet the email needs of today’s increasingly mobile workforce. And with the increased scalability of Exchange Server Service Pack 1 (SP1) Bell can add more users per server. Exchange 2003 works in conjunction with Outlook 2003, giving workers integrated collaborative messaging features such as scheduling, contact and task-management capabilities. Exchange 2003 also integrates with BlackBerry devices so that workers can be as productive on the road as they are in the office.
“Many of our employees rely on mobile devices to connect to the office, and the numbers are growing,” says Ducharme. “By the end of the year, we’ll have close to 4,000 workers using mobile devices. We really couldn’t afford to have problems with synchronizing into the network. Moving to Exchange and Outlook just made sense.”
Business Benefits
With Windows Server 2003, Bell Canada created a modern, dependable platform to support the communication and collaboration services that Exchange Server 2003 and Outlook 2003 deliver. Employees can access their email from home or on the road, and easily connect with their colleagues through the enhanced messaging and collaboration capabilities of Outlook 2003.
Increased Employee Productivity
Now that Bell has standardized its email and messaging platform with Exchange Server 2003, staff are able to communicate with their colleagues easily, receiving project updates by email and scheduling meetings without conflict or delay.
“One of the big selling points for Bell, especially with its Netscape users, was the calendaring feature in Outlook 2003. With its previous emailing system, users didn’t have the ability to check other people’s calendars which made scheduling meetings pretty difficult,” says Springings. “For an organization of its size, Bell saw Outlook’s free/busy feature as a real godsend.”
Mobile workers often had limited access to email as access to the corporate network through VPN was not always possible. With Outlook 2003 and Microsoft Office Outlook Web Access (OWA) in place, employees have the ability to access email regardless of connection, which has helped make workers more productive. Outlook Web Access also offers mobile users secure access to the corporate network and lets them continue to be productive whether they are at home, on the road or at the office.
“Our employees really see the value in having Outlook Web Access. With it, our employees no longer need to bring their Bell laptop home to connect to the network – they can access their work email from their home computer,” says Ducharme. “It’s a real boon to the folks who didn’t have access in the past.”
Simplified User Experience
In the previous environment, users would need to login at many different points to gain access to the corporate network. Through Active Directory, Bell was able to minimize the number of logins people had to remember, simplifying the user experience.
“When employees log in to their user account – the Active Directory account when they turn on their machine – those credentials automatically pass through their Outlook to their mail system, which means they don’t have to log in again to check their email,” says Ducharme. “It’s definitely simplified the user experience.”
More Efficient IT Operations
Bell centralized its operations into one main data centre in Toronto and now operates more efficiently on a common, consistent platform. Because the administrators are on the same platform, they can share information and collaborate easily. Bell no longer needs to bring in outside support to maintain the Exchange environment.
“In our previous environment, we needed to buy support service from CGI. When we migrated to Exchange 2003, we took this opportunity to partner with CGI and Microsoft to create a service where Bell Canada plays an active role in the management of the mail servers,” says Ducharme. “Now we understand and control the amount of operations expense that we invest in the service.”
Microsoft Windows Server System
Microsoft® Windows Server System is a comprehensive, integrated, and interoperable server infrastructure that helps reduce the complexity and costs of building, deploying, connecting, and operating agile business solutions. Windows Server System helps customers create new value for their business through the strategic use of their IT assets. With the Windows Server operating system as its foundation, Windows Server System delivers dependable infrastructure for data management and analysis; enterprise integration; customer, partner, and employee portals; business process automation; communications and collaboration; and core IT operations including security, deployment, and systems management.
For more information about Windows Server System, go to: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: www.microsoft.com
For more information about CGI products and services, call 514 841-3200 or visit the Web site at: www.cgi.com
For more information about Bell Canada products and services, call 1 888 932-6666 or visit the Web site at: www.bell.ca
