Case Study 1

:: client overview
An international airport located in the North of England, which has seen impressive passenger growth year on year, and is now recognised as being one of Europe's fastest growing regional airports.

:: business challenges
Although the company's IT department continues to operate autonomously, the infrastructure and technologies are aligned with the group standards, which are predominantly based around Microsoft technologies.

The airport were operating a legacy Novell NetWare environment for their office staff, and a Microsoft Windows platform to manage the critical airport functions such as flight management, baggage handling and check-in. Management of the Novell NetWare environment was becoming increasingly difficult along with issues around reliability. As a consequence of this, the IT infrastructure was reviewed, and was deemed to be lacking in several key areas.

Platform Consultancy Services (Platform) was approached to design a completely new IT infrastructure for the airport office systems which would increase both the service availability and user productivity, whilst decreasing the administrative burden and support calls received by the helpdesk.

The customer required Platform to perform a migration of user accounts, computer resources, data and E-Mail with very little visible impact to the user community, and perform this on a rolling basis, department by department, until all the legacy systems had been decommissioned.

As always, timeframes were tight as future projects relied heavily on the delivery of the key service requirements.

:: the solution
Individuals in our consultancy team were assigned to the project and were involved with the client at an early stage to maintain consistency and ensure a full working knowledge of other related projects.

Platform produced a detailed directory service and messaging design based on Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Active Directory, Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Cluster services. The design catered for all of the requirements as set out by the client.

The Microsoft Active Directory, Exchange 2003 messaging platform and clustered file and print servers were configured offsite in a Proof of Concept lab due to restricted space being available in the airports data-centre. The client was able to work with Platform during the configuration of the systems and services in order to grasp the concepts involved in the new technologies.

Platform worked with the customer and the Project Manager to coordinate the delivery of a fully working solution to the client's premises, which sat alongside the legacy systems during the period of the migration.

Over the next weeks, network services (DHCP and DNS), data and mailboxes were migrated from the NetWare and GroupWise servers onto the Microsoft Windows servers on a departmental basis using Quest Migrator for Groupwise. The departmental PC's were all re-installed with Windows XP Professional and an application bundle automatically deployed using MS Remote Installation Services (RIS).

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