Mahesh Sharma | July 15, 2008
case study | Minter Ellison
LAW firm Minter Ellison has ditched its Novell GroupWise email system because it didn't offer the third-party application integration of a Microsoft suite.
Ian Kirby says Outlook works better with other applications
Most firms are adopting a dual-filing approach.
National operations technology manager Ian Kirby says Novell's GroupWise didn't offer the necessary integration with the company's document management software.
"When you've got an explosion in the volume of email, it's a lot easier and quicker to drag and drop emails into a matter-centric folder, so each client is represented by a folder in the document management system and each matter is a sub-folder of that," Kirby says.
"The document management system integrates nicely into Outlook and you can drive the whole document management system and email system from the one interface.
"We're looking at other products and bolting more products onto the interface.
"Other vendors are working to integrate natively into Outlook but they aren't doing much work to integrate into Novell."
Minter Ellison worked with EMC to centralise its document management system and move to a clustered Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition as its back-end database.
As the firm migrated its email system to Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 it also installed an email archiving system that captures every email sent and received by Minter Ellison, including all internal email.
These are stored on an EMC CLARiiON CX3-40 storage area network disk array.
Minter Ellison faced challenges in moving to a brand new email system.
"The simple volume of data was a challenge in its own right," Kirby says. "There were 12 million emails that we transferred from Groupwise into Exchange.
"Lots of things needed to be considered. We were moving every single email historically that was in the old system.
"The other challenge was that we were moving from a distributed infrastructure to a centralised one, so all data had to be moved across WAN links in a way that didn't impede productivity."
The move improved Minter Ellison's disaster recovery capabilities and it is introducing VMWare virtualisation technology, which has freed up the technology team.
"That frees people up to spend more time working on projects that bring strategic value to the business, rather than installing service packs, and keeping the lights on.
"We're delivering more value to the business with the staff and budgets we have by reducing the complexity and management overheads of our infrastructure," Kirby says.
THE PROBLEM
Minter Ellison needed to move from its Novell Groupwise email installation because it did not integrate properly with third-party software.
THE PROCESS
It appointed EMC to handle the migration to Microsoft's Exchange email system and to centralise its email database.
THE RESULT
The email suite now has seamless third-party cross-functionality, and virtualisation technology has eased pressure on the technology team.