Case Studies

Case study 1:

Lotus Notes Application Assessment and Full Migration

The Client

The client is wholly-owned by the Malaysian government and is vested with the entire ownership and control of petroleum resources in Malaysia. Over the years, the client has grown to become a fully-integrated oil and gas corporation and is ranked among the FORTUNE Global 500’s largest corporations in the world. The client has four subsidiaries listed on the Bursa Malaysia and has ventured globally into more than 30 countries worldwide in its aspiration to become a leading oil and gas corporation of choice.

Requirements

• Full migration of collaboration platform to Exchange Server 2003 & Sharepoint Portal Server 2003/VS.NET 2003;

• Consolidate application system & centralize management to all application;

• Communications with a work force of 24,000 which has been using more than 12,000 applications spread across 6 regions in Malaysia.

• Transfer our knowledge to the client to help 50 of IT staff members become MS Certified Professionals.

Client Challenge

• The client faced with an outdated Notes environment that no longer met their needs.

• The client did not have the ability to assess the value of their current Notes infrastructure, could not plan costs of migration and had no concept of scope.

• The costs and manpower associated with a large migration prohibited an in-house migration, the client needed a reliable partner with cost-effective and experienced resources to increase delivery, free their own resources and reduce cost to maintain a solid ROI.

Our Approach

• FPT established an inventory of over 12,000 databases. Using technical methods about ¼ of these databases were selected as possibly needing migration. Further interviews with application owners and our guidance for management to define remediation criteria reduced the number of databases to less than 1,600. Finally, FPT condensed and rationalized these databases to result in less than 700 applications requiring migration.

• Using the owner, location and complexity of the to be migrated applications a complete migration plan was established, including training of users, IT staff and management, along with coexistence planning and coordination with a parallel mail migration.

• Over the course of 18 months we moved all in-scope applications to Sharepoint and .NET and rolled out the new platform across the company. This was done with a team of business and requirements analysts, a data migration team, a large offshore Dev/Test team, and a mobile rollout team that travelled to each regional office to rollout the migrated applications and ensure adoption took place in all communities.

Solution

• Complete planning for the project and future platforms, including cost saving rationalization and consolidation exercises.

• Full Migration of hundreds of Notes Applications to Microsoft platforms.

• Training and Transition management for thousands of users and dozens of IT staff.

Technologies Used

• Microsoft Exchange Server 2003,

• VS.NET2003, SQL Server 2005,

• Source Code K2.NET 2003,

• Cashahl ecKnowledge 8.1.6,

• Application Transporter,

• MIIS,

• Quest Migrator,

• Notes Connector.

Benefits to Customer

• Significant cost savings as the unnecessary licensing expenses for thousands of application was erased.

• Reduce cost and complexity by standardizing on a single directory service.

• The client’s enterprise-wide IT objective of gaining an adaptable, central 360 degree view of messaging and collaboration system was fulfilled.

• The productivity and flexibility of employees of the client have been improved after the complement of the system migration project. We transferred our knowledge to the client to help 50 of its IT staff members become Microsoft Certified Professional and capable of performing maintenance and development in .NET/SPS in the future.

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Case study 2:

Lotus Notes Application Assessment

Client Challenge

• The National Australia Bank had a legacy Lotus Notes environment which was outdated, posed risk to the bank for future support costs, and harmed their reputation as a cutting edge technical leader

• Before removal of the legacy system could begin an inventory needed to be established as the bank’s inventory was out of date and incomplete

• Many Notes databases were not maintained, had no owners or decision makers associated with them, and no process was in place to remediate these ownerless applications

• Without a view of application count, complexity, future platform selection and timelines an ROI could not be established and a decision to fund the project could not be made

Our Approach

• Scanned all Domino servers in the bank to obtain the first comprehensive database Inventory. This was subsequently sorted into databases of possible interest to migrate vs databases to retire or archive, such as: out of use, Notes Specific, server management.

• The inventory subset of possible to be migrated databases were then further assessed as part of the Detailed Assessment The owners and decision makers for these applications were contacted and surveyed, selecting their applications for migration, replacement by an existing out of the box solution, or archival.

• Finally, the applications selected for migration were assessed by our technical teams to determine: future platform, data size, complexity, timeline, costs, and identify potential issues and solutions.

• Using the data from these three steps a full map of the current environment is established, the roadmap to removal is presented, and the future platform can be planned and sized. This includes timelines and costs for the Application Migration project. Combined with projected future platform costs an ROI can be established and the decision to move ahead with the migration can make.

Solution

• Technical staff scanned all servers using our custom scripts

• Business analysts implemented a survey to sort applications into various categories

• Engagement managers met with management to establish the migration and assessment strategy

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Case study 3:

VB Migration

The Client

The client is a manufacturer and distributor of precision measuring instruments. It is headquartered in Kawasaki, Kanagawa, Japan. The company was established in 1934.

Requirements

The existing system of the client was based on Oracle 8.0.5. However, due to the licensing issue, they wanted to upgrade to Oracle 9.2.0.4 which meant the whole sale applications (258 modules) written in VB 5.0 had to be converted to VB .NET

Challenges

• Converting a huge number of modules in VB 5.0 to VB .NET can cause many unpredictable issues, therefore the solution had to be insightful - there was a need to ensure that enough flexibility was built-in to the new system to accommodate changing business and regulatory requirements.

• Despite being well equipped with all the necessary domain and technology skills, our team had to work closely with the client to understand all the necessary aspects of the complex sale system.

• This was the first time our client had worked with an offshore technology partner. Thus program management became crucial, not only to meet deliverables and deadlines, but also to reassure the client on its maiden offshore exercise.

Solutions

• We worked closely with our client on this project. A 67 member team took ownership of the complete end-to-end solution - from requirement definition to testing, and then to the final implementation.

• The team developed a standard Conversion Process and Conversion tool to compare between VB 5.0 code and VB .NET source code, and thus prevent any undesirable issues.

• We used its domain specialists extensively to understand the client's needs and the System Specification. The project was completed in 8 months, during that time the team rewrote the entire sale system including 258 modules in VB 5.0 to VB .NET.

• After accomplishing the conversion phase, the team implemented unit testing in order to eliminate uncertainty in the modules themselves. NUnit, an open source unit testing framework for Microsoft .NET was applied. The process made the integration testing much easier.

• Our team also supported the client in deploying the system in Tokyo.

Benefits to Customer

• The most important thing from the vendor point of view was that the costs were cut dramatically, major bugs in the system were removed to migrate seamlessly with Oracle database.

• Technologies Used: Oracle 8.0.5, Oracle 9.2.0.4, Visual 6, Visual Studio .NET version 2003, Visual Source Safe 6.0, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Nunit.

Technologies Used
Oracle 8.0.5, Oracle 9.2.0.4, Visual 6, Visual Studio .NET version 2003, Visual Source Safe 6.0, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Nunit.

Duration: 1st April 2005 – 10th February 2006

Effort: 4592 person-days

Team Size: 67

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