Royal Paper, a mid-sized paper goods manufacturer signed on with Tymor Technologies MSP service in June of 2008. In September, the company initialized a project to migrate their email services from Exchange Server 2003 to Exchange Server 2007. This seeming straight-forward migration is anything but. There are significant differences from one platform to another including enhanced security and Improvements to collaboration and productivity by making it easier to find and share data, documents, and schedules from anywhere. All of these elements make migration a careful process. Being a manufacturer up-time is crucial as many of their clients send important and sensitive proofs and print copy for their products which include some of the larger Food Service companies in the Delaware Valley.  With this in mind Royal Paper turned to their new Managed Services Provider, Tymor Technologies to meet the challenge.

 

The project to a total of 2 days in September, 2008. The company had ordered the new server several months back, from Dell Computer and upon “cracking the box” Tymor discovered the first challenge of the project, it was the wrong type of system.  Dell had shipped the new server unit with a 32 bit operating systems installed and configured. The problem is that Exchange Server 2007 requires a 64 bit OS and has strict minimums for hardware. The problem was quickly addressed by Tymor engineers and the server was readied with no loss of project time. The next major challenge was OWA or Outlook Web Access. The new, default login page for Exchange Server 2007 was lacking in features and controls that the client needed to have for their security systems. This was not known prior to the installation as the client had researched the project prior to the Tymor team joining them. This too was quickly addressed by moving the login director to a custom page that preserved the 2003 type login interface while back-ending to the new Exchange web services. Once again this was mitigated with little impact on the project roll-out.  There where some unique aspects to this project like a high proportion of VPN users (sales force personnel, telecommuters etc..) that made it an interesting and rewarding project. And technical hurdles that came up at the last minute such as the OWA landing page issue and an issue with the default mailbox size limit changes from 2003 to 2007 that needed to be addressed on a user by user basis (once again, being in paper goods many of their mail boxes are exceptionally large due to client art copy). In the end Royal Paper got their new Exchange Server 2007 and settled in and continues to this day as a significant MSP client.