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Wings Travel Management takes an unusual path to the Office 365 cloud


Cape Town, 26 Apr 2016
Wings Travel Management takes an unusual path to the Office 365 cloud
Wings Travel Management takes an unusual path to the Office 365 cloud

Migrating from unsupported Exchange 2003 on-premises servers to a fully-functional hybrid cloud solution, Wings Travel Management and Soarsoft International prove that all roads really can lead to the cloud.

Wings Travel Management is a specialist in oil- and gas-related business travel, with regional hubs and satellite offices located all over the world. Because of the international nature of their business, easy and secure communication and collaboration between various offices has always been vital, so when it became clear that their systems required updating, a cloud solution seemed like the most logical choice.

When Wings first approached Soarsoft International for a cloud migration solution, however, they were running Exchange 2003 on their on-premises servers - an end-of-life version no longer supported by Microsoft. They had attempted to upgrade to Exchange 2010, but had encountered problems along the way which had left the server environment in a suboptimal condition. Their challenge for Soarsoft was to implement a solution that would successfully rehabilitate their environment, migrate all their global branches to Office 365, and provide identity management and federation services for their 500+ users.

Undeterred by the complexities of the outdated software, the Soarsoft team set about creating a customised roadmap to the cloud for Wings. Its solution involved a hybrid Office 365 migration with a new Exchange 2010 server, a fix for the existing environment's issues, and the setting up of identity and access management using a third-party solution called IAM Cloud.

Given that it was a little different from the typical migration path, however, Soarsoft was expecting to encounter a few bumps along the way.

The first major complication arose when the free/busy lookup between the on-premises and Office 365 environments failed. Having double-checked our implementation, Soarsoft logged a ticket with Microsoft who confirmed that everything had been correctly executed. The failure was attributed to the environment's unsupported Exchange 2003 origins that had not been mitigated by the new Exchange 2010 Hybrid server that Soarsoft had set up.

Given that they no longer supported Exchange 2003 in any way, Microsoft offered no help with the problem whatsoever. That didn't stop the Soarsoft team from coming up with a solution. It migrated all of the mailboxes (some of which were over 20GB) from the original 2003 servers to the 2010 servers before sending them on to Office 365. By using Exchange 2010 as a middle-man in the migration process like this, it managed to negate the issues caused by Exchange 2003. The free/busy lookup functionality worked perfectly thereafter.

Apart from a few other minor complications, the rest of the migration process went remarkably smoothly. The only other unusual challenge it encountered was finding suitable times to implement changes remotely, outside the working hours of numerous offices across multiple time-zones. A few midnight shifts made quick work of this, however, and the migration was considered a success by all involved.

A year later, Soarsoft International continues to support Wings Travel Management, and recently concluded the transfer of their identity and access management from the original IAM Cloud 3rd-party solution to Microsoft Azure's ADFS. It has also provided guidance on the potential rollout of Skype for Business, and looks forward to assisting Wings in their ongoing efforts to optimise their information and collaboration systems.

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Soarsoft International

Delivering trusted, proven solutions for the efficient management of unstructured data Soarsoft International provides Information Management Solutions that enable large and medium enterprises to efficiently capture, store, migrate, search, share and analyse unstructured data - like e-mails, instant messaging, documents and files.

Soarsoft International's suite of specialist solutions include:

* Messaging and collaboration.
* Content migration and cloud adoption.
* Archiving and eDiscovery.
* File analysis and governance.

Soarsoft is a Global enterprise solutions provider and has deployed solutions to large organisations and sites in excess of 45 thousand users. Some of the entities we have delivered solutions for include Global Brands such as Nielson, Barclay Card, Sony Pictures, Warner Bros, Old Mutual, Global Telecom and a number of Internationally-based utilities and financial institutions.

In Southern Africa it has implemented solutions for four of the largest Mobile Telcos, six of the top 10 retailers and the majority of the top legal firms, hospital and financial institutions, including the largest listed financial services group in Southern Africa.

Editorial contacts

Xan Le Grange
Three6five
xan@soarsoft.co.za