»Konsolidierung der Email- und
Messaging-Systeme der Swisscom:
Microsoft Exchange für 20'000
Arbeitsplätze«
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»Konsolidierung der Email- und
Messaging-Systeme der Swisscom:
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Just inside the main lobby of Swisscom's Information Technology headquarters is a clock running backwards.
With Swiss precision, it counts down the number of seconds left until the end of 1997, as a reminder to all who enter of the impending business challenges with de-regulation of the telecommunications industry.
"With the privatization that will come into force on the first of January 1998, European telecom companies will have to leave the monopolistic national market and enter worldwide competition," says Dr. Eric Scholl, head of Swisscom's Corporate Services Section. "Our challenge is to defend and consolidate our leadership within the Swiss telecommunications marketplace, and to acquire new strategic positions worldwide."
Swisscom is known as one of the world's premier and most efficient providers of telecommunications services. The excitement of being able to apply that expertise to other markets is quite evident throughout the company. In restructuring the business, they intend to be a formidable competitive force in the future.
At the same time, the company is dealing with major technical issues facing all telecom providers: the need to develop innovative new services, combined with the need to restructure their network infrastructure to support the growing fusion of data and voice communications.
Key to the company's infrastructure redesign was the need for a modern electronic mail and messaging system. "Swisscom has to have a reliable system for E-mail," says Dr. Scholl. "With more than 20,000 messages sent every day, it is our main form of communication for managing the company and managing the changes we need to implement for de-regulation. A system that is not reliable would be a catastrophe."
To support the business flexibility and workforce mobility required to move into new markets, the company had to quickly implement a completely new messaging and communication infrastructure.
"In the past, we had more than 35,000 mail accounts, spread over 10 different E-mail platforms," says Dr. Scholl. "Users often needed more than one account – and sometimes three or four – to do their work, because there was no interoperability between the different systems."
Several hundred aging servers were required to maintain the various mail systems, which included Xerox GlobalView, UNIX Mail, DIGITAL ALL-IN-1, Lotus Notes and a very large MS-Mail infrastructure.
Interestingly enough, the older mail systems were quite reliable, except for one larger system. "But the administration of the different systems was either very laborious," says Dr. Scholl, "or didn't meet the users' requirements, or were at the end of their lifetime. Our primary goal was to replace our legacy mail systems."
Swisscom considered various state-of-the-art messaging systems, and found that the easiest, least-risky and quickest solution was to migrate to the MS-Mail follow-on product, Microsoft Exchange.
"Today, you do not mainly choose a product; you choose a supplier," Dr. Scholl says. "And as Microsoft is the defacto standard in today's office automation environment, it was very easy to select the appropriate product."
For local support in implementing Exchange, Swisscom chose DIGITAL, due to the long-standing partnership that has existed between the two companies. "DIGITAL understood our enterprise computing environment, and we really appreciate the technical skill of DIGITAL's staff," says Dr. Scholl. "On the other hand, nobody denies the innovative spirit of Microsoft. In this project, the three companies – DIGITAL, Microsoft and Swisscom – had to work together very closely as partners to implement the new Exchange technology, which was new for all of us."
Due to the instability of the existing mail system, the new platform had to be implemented quickly. The implementation team devised a migration plan that would move the installed user base to 30 new DIGITAL Prioris ZX Exchange Server systems, operating at 20 distributed sites throughout Switzerland. Coexistence with legacy mail systems would be provided through the transition period via the Exchange X.400 Connector.
Great emphasis was put on coming up with an optimal design right from the start to avoid disruptive future strategy changes. DIGITAL networking and mail consultants helped project management and implementation across the enterprise.
"Part way through the project, we went through a business reorganization in which the implementation responsibility was handed from one department to another," says Dr. Scholl. "The thoroughness of the migration plan turned out to be a major benefit, because that transition was handled without any significant loss of time to the project schedule."
As of April 1997, more than half of Swisscom's 15,000 users had completely moved over to the Exchange environment, and the need for coexistence with legacy mail environments had begun to diminish in importance.
"We didn't encounter any unanticipated problems that required a redesign of the implementation plan," says Dr. Scholl.
Even "through the training sessions, the users had no trouble understanding the sophisticated functionality's of the new system," continued Dr. Scholl "That's really astonishing. Usually on a project you have unexpected elements, but I must say that with our thorough planning we didn't have any such problems."
The new Exchange system is all managed centrally from Swisscom's headquarters in Bern. With only one-quarter of the staff we presently manage a traffic ten-times higher than before. This dramatic increase of the traffic also shows the enabling effect of the new system.
The new system has helped Swisscom bring stability to its mail backbone infrastructure. "We do not need to reboot the gateways several times a day, as we did in the past," says Dr. Scholl. "For the first time, we now can depend on a fully stable mail backbone."
In addition, thanks to the gateway functionality of the Exchange Connector, Swisscom has been able to remove different gateways previously required between the legacy environments, and the routing of messages has been drastically simplified.
Most importantly, says Dr. Scholl, "our users are very happy with the system – and they are very demanding, as we have been using sophisticated office automation systems for over 10 years now."
Concurrent with the Exchange roll-out is the company's implementation of what they call the "Telecom Workplace" initiative. The Telecom Workplace is a standardized PC used for desktop and mobile computing environments. It includes a limited number of fixed hardware configurations (to simplify support), including DIGITAL Celebris, Venturis and HiNote laptop PC's, packaged with software clients and tools such as SAP R/3, timetables, flight tables and so forth. It is designed to support a new customer care system that will play a main part in the new post-deregulation business processes being developed.
From the user's point of view, the new Exchange capabilities also help to simplify the use of email and are very much appreciated. For example, with the previous systems, mail could not be read when the user was traveling or on holiday. When people were out of the office, things didn't happen, and work slowed down. With the new Exchange implementation this bottleneck has been removed, and business is able to be conducted remotely.
"We now have a reliable and state-of-the-art messaging system," says Dr. Scholl. "This is and was our primary goal. We are very confident that this system will meet our needs for a number of years to come."
The company is looking to extend the current Exchange implementation with its support of workflow and workgroup computing in the near future, along with a full integration with the company's Intranet/Internet solutions and other customer service innovations that Swisscom might offer such as Internet telephony.
What will the final implementation look like? "I am afraid there will never be a final implementation," says Dr. Scholl. "Swisscom is a growing and expanding company. We have already expanded our sites to include connections to our offices in North America and to the far east, to our joint venture SPT in Prague, and to our Unisource alliance partners through an extended Intranet. It is important that the system stay dynamic and continue to meet those changing needs."
"But we are confident that whatever we do, this system will be able to meet any future requirements that deregulation may bring."
What would the company suggest to other enterprises moving to Exchange? "We recommend that such a project should not be started without thorough enterprise-wide planning," says Dr. Scholl. "It is very important to have a sound domain concept. Correct timing of the training – not too early, not too late – is crucial. The support must be fully organized and in operation before users are transferred from one system to another. And finally, end-to-end control is very important – only one responsibility for design, planning, server installation, client installation, user information, and training. Without that, each group will do their own thing, and it won't fit together."
June , 1997
Spokesperson:
Dr. Eric Scholl, Corporate Services
Headquarter Swisscom
Bern, Switzerland
