Client Corner

In this section we will be highlighting our various clients.

We like to help those who help us!  If you are interested in sharing your company with the rest of our clients send us a note at mtbw@mtbw.com.

 

Feel free to send us  items of interest that we can share or refer a product or excellent service you’ve encountered lately.

Newsletter contributions can be e-mailed to mtbw@mtbw.com. Be sure to put the words “client corner” in the subject line. Thank you!

Any network conversion is involved and not only requires technical knowledge, but the ability to effectively and efficiently manage the project. Email is such an integral component of almost every business today, that the loss of not only email access, but the messages, contacts, tasks and notes utilized daily would have a deleterious effect on the operations of any company.  Data migration, obviously imperative also, is a more straight forward operation, though it must be handled professionally. The migration of any email system though is a much more difficult task.

 

There were two issues confronting the Advantage Homes migration that made the project more prone to potential issues. First, only a subset of employees was being migrated from Netware and Groupwise to Windows 2003 and Exchange 2003. This meant the data and email had to be specifically selected and migrated, whereas in a complete system transformation all information is transferred. Though the amount of data is less, insuring that only selected users were transferred and simultaneously not affecting the Netware and Groupwise functionality of the others was a delicate issue. Secondly, since the Advantage Homes migration meant that the new server would be running at a different location, there wasn’t the opportunity to run dual systems simultaneously for a period of time. This was a project that required a hard migration date with almost zero fallback options.

 

“Here at MTBW Services we’re agnostic when it comes to technology. We work in both the Novell and Microsoft environments and have for literally over a decade,” stated Greg Baharoff, System Engineer at MTBW Services Inc. He continued, “Where this diversity of knowledge really is invaluable is during migrations from one environment to another. If the systems engineer’s knowledge is monopolized by one environment then the migration process is more likely to run into difficulties. Since we know both Microsoft and Novell product lines extensively we can insure successful migrations. This is especially true when migrating email systems, because for the most part different products don’t play nice with one another. The transfer of email messages is just one component of the process. Address books that have been created over an extended period of time are very valuable to clients. Then there are tasks and scheduled activities that most email systems track that also need to be accessible in the new email client.”

 

Utilizing a set of Microsoft and third party utilities, the migration occurred without any interruptions or loss of data. On a Friday afternoon the Advantage Homes staff was using Netware and Groupwise and the following Monday they were using Windows Server 2003 and Exchange 2003. All data, email messages, contacts, activities and notes were available on Monday morning that were available to the employees on Friday afternoon.

 

Debbie Malott summed up the project best by stating “The entire group at MTBW has provided Advantage Homes with a level of service and experience that is unsurpassed.  We appreciate the service they provide so much that we awarded MTBW our 2005 Outstanding Service Provider Award.”