The British Film Institute had a large 700 user Windows and Exchange environment that had not been upgraded for some time.

The server hardware was old and out of warranty with HP, support for the Windows and Exchange environments were soon to be removed. Network users were complaining of slow access times, and the general user experience could be improved.

The active directory environment was all Windows 2000 mixed mode, all the existing NT4 servers had been replaced, but the domain function level had not been raised.

Most of the network computers were running Windows XP and Outlook 2003, but some were running Outlook 2000.

Mcafee Groupshield was installed on the Exchange server to scan the information store, and Mcafee Virusscan was installed as a file/memory scanner on all servers and desktop machines.

Blackberry Enterprise server was in use for mobile communications, and Symantec Enterprise Vault was the mail archival tool of choice.

Network users had been complaing of slow access times to their mailboxes - Outlook was slow and sluggish and it took quite a while for the inital screen to appear.

The management were concerned that if a hardware failure occoured - the time it would take to get the systems working again would be too great.

Day to day support for the support team was becoming increasingly difficult, more and more users were complaining and general user morale was becoming an issue.

Upgrading to Exchange 2007 was not a simple process. All domain controllers needed to be replaced, the client software would need to be upgraded to Outlook 2003 at a minimum, and network related services like DNS and DHCP would need to be re-housed.

Downtime was a huge issue as users accessed the systems on a 24/7 basis - all server replacements would have to have no impact on users.

Overview

• Unified Messaging integration

• Increased fault tolerance

• Enhanced user experience

• Hardware platform now supported

The first issue we had to deal with was the domain controllers - although Exchange 2007 and Windows 2000 domain controllers can co-exist, at least one domain controller must be running Windows 2003, the global catalog must also be running Windows 2003 so the decision was made to replace all the domain controllers with Windows 2003 based systems.

Using Microsoft best practices, the domain controllers, network related services and FSMO roles were replaced with no downtime for network users.

All client machines and citrix servers were upgraded to Outlook 2003 by the IT support team to ensure connectivity to the new servers.A 2 server Exchange system was chosen, with the mailbox and hub transport roles on one of the servers, and the client access role on the second.

The mailboxes were moved over a weekend, with downtime to the users limited to when own mailbox was actually moved from the old to the new server. The mailboxes were distributed across four mailboxes stores for load balancing and user policy management purposes. Enterprise Vault and Blackberry enterprise were setup to connect to the new Exchange system and tested by internal and external users.

Once the mailboxes were moved and the Exchange system services were relocated to the respective server, the old Exchange servers could then be de-commissioned.

Before this was done incoming SMTP mail from the edge firewall was routed to the new mailbox server, and webmail requests were routed to the client access server. The user morale has increased dramatically as they are no longer waiting for their computer to catch up with what they are doing.

The support team are now not over worked as the support queues are smaller they even have time for personal development. The management are confident that in the event of a hardware failure, they could have the servers running again within hours and were confident the new infrastructure would perform very well for at least 4 years.

Once the project was completed, the in house support staff were trained on basic Exchange server operations - and were shown how to perform mailbox and mailbox store restorations.

The entire system was then documented and signed off by the IT staff at BFI.