Birmingham City Council

Birmingham City Council, Europe's largest local government organisation, are working on a migration to Microsoft technologies. As part of this they need to move off Lotus Notes email.

As with all email migrations for large organisations they need to co-exist Lotus Notes email and Exchange over a number of months. As we often see, the deficiencies with native Microsoft Transporter messaging was shown up soon a pilot was setup in Q2 2009. The in-house organisation requested Longfield to install Binary Tree's CMT CoExistence as part of their migration pilot.

Microsoft Transporter provides Exchange Server 2007 with a basic connection to Lotus Domino Server for email and directory synchronisation. It has known limitations, being a free product from Microsoft, in particular calendar data becomes corrupted when travelling between Notes and Exchange, which for senior executives is unacceptable as they live their life through email appointment messages.

Microsoft Consulting had originally installed a basic Microsoft Transporter environment for Birmingham City Council in May 2009. Having setup a vanilla configuration, Longfield updated the Transporter configuration to provide enhanced configuration and layered CMT CoExistence into the environement.

After a week on site, a basic CMT CoExistence environment was supporting there 100 Outlook users in migration pilot connected to the Birmingham production Domino Servers.

Birmingham are currently looking a increasing their pilot up to 900 production users.