Bordeaux Metropolitan Borough Council (the Communauté Urbaine de Bordeaux or CUB) was one of the first four metropolitan borough councils created in France, in 1968. 120 elected representatives, 27 municipalities, 36 Vice-Presidents and 4 Mayors sit on the Council and drive forward large-scale projects with the aim of offering public services that are ever more innovative and close to its citizens’ needs.
A pioneering migration to Microsoft Exchange 2010
Based in the Information Systems Services Department – which is responsible for numerous modernization projects – the Production Services teams design server, network and telephony architectures, guarantee their availability and ensure that they are updated to constantly respond more effectively to the Council’s business needs. Which is why, in 2010, CUB embarked on a comprehensive messaging infrastructure modernization project, so as to offer even better services to its users.
As part of a four-year support, assistance and auditing contract for Microsoft technologies, the Council decided to call on Bull to ensure the successful delivery of this project and to directly migrate its 3,000 Microsoft Exchange 2003 mailboxes to the very latest version of the software: Exchange 2010… making a real leap forward in technological terms and ensuring greatly improved performance.
Backed up by Microsoft Gold certification – regularly renewed by Bull – the company’s teams delivered an end-to-end project including: a technical audit of the existing infrastructure, a scoping study for servers and storage areas, establishing the pre-requisites for the production environment, definition of the roll-out scenario, implementation of supporting technologies to secure email exchanges (Microsoft Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange) and finally, complete migration to the new environment.
This represents a major step forward for CUB, with a solution that features new functionality such as on-line mail archiving, improved high availability, and performance improvements thanks to the updated architecture. CUB can now take a measured approach to planning further updates to modern, unified messaging solutions and so gradually ensure convergence between its real-time communications infrastructures (telephony, audio and video-conferencing) and those supporting asynchronous communications (electronic messaging).
“Thanks to their very advanced technical analysis and the excellent co-operation between the teams from CUB and Bull’s experts, the project proved to be totally transparent to users,” explains Frédéric Aubert, CUB’s Infrastructure Manager. “The new Microsoft Exchange 2010 infrastructure is now being operated and managed by our own teams.”
Bull’s teams proved to be highly responsive, supported by a highly professional and structured approach, and proved themselves capable of managing the risks involved in this transformation project while also taking into account the Council’s specific requirements, like the need for secure mobile access to email from the PDAs and the smartphones widely used by CUB’s management staff and senior executives.
The solution – which has now been fully rolled out – benefits from industrial-level support from Bull’s Microsoft Support Center, which is home to Microsoft certified specialists in multi-vendor environments and provides high-specification call-handling and escalation tools, platforms and procedures for everything up to Level 3 support.
