IT Pro Momentum Program Results (Exchange Server 2007 Deployment) – Anonymous Company

Objectives of the project: What problem did you set out to solve?  CEO To use all the new features of Office 2007 and to easily deploy an email server at a remote location.

Are you piloting or deploying the products?  Deployed. We started minimal testing by moving some IT Mailboxes over to Exchange 2007 from Exchange 2003.

Products used in the project (all that apply):  Windows Server 2003, Exchange Server 2007, ESX with VMotion and HA.  

Project description:  We deployed Exchange Servers in a main datacenter and a remote location with less than stable bandwidth. I was able to setup SCR for a storage group with all users from another office, overnighted the server to the other office, let the seeding catch up and failed over that SG, thereby providing a server to that office without having to move very large mailboxes (10GB+), including our CEO’s mailbox (our CEO set the requirement of an exchange server local to him).   The main challenge was training users on new version of Outlook/Office. It took many of them a few months to really catch on.  

Were the objective stated at the beginning satisfied? Did you solve the problem?  Yes. The SCR server-move trick was a huge win. Plus, we are now fully utilizing Transport Rules.  

Are you going to save money? How much over how many years?  The objective was not to save money, but to maximize our investment that was already made on Microsoft.

What do you think about the IT Pro Momentum program?  Would you have done this project without the IT Pro Momentum program? Any suggestions for improvements are appreciated. We tried to make this as easy as possible on everyone. Good. Pretty straight forward.

Harold Wong