Coats plc has tapped Dell Software’s Notes migration solutions to migrate 7,500 users from IBM Notes to Office 365 in five months.
Coats, an industrial thread and consumer textile crafts business, used Dell’s Notes Migrator for Exchange and Coexistence Manager for Notes to provide a seamless, cost-effective migration experience.
Richard Cammish, CIO, Coats plc, said: “We required solutions that would help meet our very tight project timescales and avoid any interruption to our business operations. The geographic distribution of our employees, compounded by low Internet bandwidth in some of the countries in which we operate added to the size of the challenge we faced.”
Why Coats dump IBM Notes
Coats used IBM Notes as its messaging environment for 15 years, but, as the company globalized, the Notes environment did not meet its communication needs.
The textile company faced challenges during its global expansion.
The expense of maintaining legacy technology and the compatibility challenges associated with IBM Notes integration with emerging platforms – notably mobile technologies – was a key driver in Coats seeking to upgrade its messaging platform.
Rather than migrating users in one country at a time, Dell’s Notes Migration solution set allowed Coats to migrate users from multiple countries – some with low bandwidth – simultaneously and without disruption to the business while vastly cutting migration costs by automating much of the process.
Dell’s Notes Migrator for Exchange’s ability to scale for Coats’ project size and complexity while transferring email, personal address books, calendars, and archives ensured a fast, accurate migration that completed on time, and minimized the risk of data loss.
While the migration was in progress, Dell’s Coexistence Manager for Notes ensured users could continue to collaborate – send and receive emails, use meeting rooms, access shared resources, schedule recurring meetings – regardless of their migration status.
Even with some mailboxes of up to 30 gigabytes in size, Coats’ 7,500 users were migrated on schedule without disruption. The solutions reduced the cost of the project significantly by automating migration processes and delivering a solid return on investment.
Steve Dickson, senior vice president and general manager, Windows Migration and Management, Dell Software, said: “With the team of Microsoft, InfraScience and Dell Software, Coats was able to utilize our scalable, flexible migration solutions for a fast, seamless migration that maintained business continuity with very little impact on users.”
