Webber Wentzel Bowens (WWB) is one of South Africa's leading corporate law firms with offices situated in Johannesburg, London and Cape Town. With a staff of over 430 people including 90 partners, WWB is well positioned to provide insightful legal advice and assistance to international corporations in a variety of legal disciplines.
Its powerful client base includes many of the country's Top 100 companies in mining, banking, insurance, media, property and telecommunications.
According to WWB IT manager Eugene van Vuren: "We like to ensure our staff have the tools they need to deliver the high standard of legal advice our clients expect. This drove our decision to migrate to Microsoft Exchange 2007, as it offers the latest collaboration facilities and integrates with our document management system, Interwoven FileSite.
"Although WWB could have taken a phased migration by running Notes and Exchange side by side and moving users a batch at a time, this would have required supporting different front ends and integrations to our document management system. WWB's multi-disciplinary teams would be at risk of providing a reduced level of service to their clients due to incompatibilities between the various systems. It was therefore decided that the firm's entire 400-user base (600+ mail accounts and archives) should be switched to Exchange over the course of a weekend.
A zero-impact approach
"Once we had made the decision to migrate, we wanted to move quickly to reduce any possible negative impact on our business," explained Van Vuren. "This meant ensuring that all e-mails sent and received in the previous Notes environment were seamlessly accessible from Outlook. Our staff had to be able to pick up from where they left off and we simply could not afford to lose any valuable business data," continued Van Vuren.
WWB chose to work with messaging expert Soarsoft Africa, which proposed the firm use a combination of leading e-mail archive solution, AUTONOMY - ZANTAZ EAS, and TransVault, a Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange conversion tool from Essential Computing Ltd.
Fast, accurate data migration
"This big bang approach is not one we would advocate for every company," explained Warren Marks, the lead Soarsoft consultant for this project. "Ideally we would run the two environments in parallel for a while and do the migration over time, but the speed with which AUTONOMY - ZANTAZ and TransVault process data made a weekend transition a viable proposition."
TransVault converted in excess of three million e-mails across over 600 mailboxes and two Notes servers. "We were very impressed with the speed and accuracy of TransVault, and so was our customer," said Marks.
Reduced storage costs
The archive-led approach offered a number of additional benefits to WWB including significantly reduced storage costs. "By using archiving technology we were able to literally halve the amount of storage space taken up by e-mails. We had nearly half a Terabyte of e-mails in our Notes databases. Thanks to the reduplication and compression offered by EAS, this was reduced to just 200GB," explained Van Vuren.
"We also avoided filling up our brand new servers with lots of legacy data."
Big ambition, big success
"This was an ambitious project, especially as we also had to ensure that the customer's document management system was successfully migrated to work from within Outlook. This involved identifying, exporting and converting almost 100 000 e-mail records and making sure they were available via the Outlook document management interface - there were a lot of moving parts! I must say I've had easier weekends, but users at WWB logged into a stable Exchange 2007 environment on the Monday as planned and the customer is very happy," concluded Marks.
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