The goal was to create one mail domain, one source to connect to and a single mail system, says Leo Witte, the company's manager of IT governance and control. "We had almost every known mail platform in our environment," he says, including multiple versions of Exchange, Pop 3 with Outlook and Domino/Notes.

BACKGROUND:

Since the Netherlands-based company -- which includes 26 formerly independent companies in 15 countries -- was continuing to make acquisitions, it wanted a mail system that could scale readily as new divisions standardized on Outlook, he says. By the end of this year it will have 5,000 personal mailboxes plus a number of functional mailboxes.

The mail project was budgeted for 2010, with evaluation of options occupying January and February, the start of implementation in June and migration starting at the end of the summer.

Mediq considered cloud-based Web systems such as Office 365 and Google Apps, but decided the variety of systems that would have had to interface with them was too great to manage efficiently. "Cloud would have been nice if we had a standard environment in all countries," Witte says, "but migrating each country to cloud was just too big for us at that time."