CASE STUDIES POLICE MUTUAL ASSURANCE SOCIETY
Friendly Society benefits from Exchange upgrade
Background
Formed in 1922 The Police Mutual Assurance Society (PMAS) is an organisation that provides tailored financial services to members of the Police force and their families. With over 170,000 members nationwide, PMAS is the UK’s largest affinity Friendly Society and is dedicated to providing the best possible service for its members.
The PMAS charter guides the behaviour of the organisation and underpins their commitment to members. Fundamentally PMAS exists to:
- enhance the financial understanding and well being of the police family
- provide an efficient and consistent service
- provide relevant, simple to understand and value for money products
- develop lifelong relationships
PMAS is based in the Midlands with a large corporate office located in the centre of Lichfield.
Problem
Being in the financial services business, PMAS has always been an enthusiastic and forward thinking user of information technology to improve the services it can offer its members.
Consequently the PMAS IT systems are advanced and complex with a number of corporate applications based around the Microsoft Windows platform with SQL and Internet Information Server based services. A recent migration to Active Directory has also been successfully completed.
The Microsoft Exchange Server system however remained at version 5.5 and in recent times had become unstable. Due to unforeseen and recurring problems with hardware failures the system had been split over two servers, each performing different roles. Although functional, the service was very unreliable and urgently needed to be stabilised before a terminal failure.
Solution
After a thorough review of the existing situation and likely future requirements,
Nviron were tasked with providing a solution that would rationalise the Exchange infrastructure whilst upgrading the system to the latest functional level.
In addition, it was necessary to provide an upgrade path that would allow PMAS the future option of publishing the Outlook Web Access service to remote and mobile users.
The network infrastructure solution designed to update and consolidate the PMAS Exchange service was created and delivered by Nviron consultants that have many years experience in Exchange.
An initial consultancy session with PMAS technical staff quickly identified the issues and resulted in a detailed technical proposal that clearly and graphically listed the stages and timescales. One of the key elements identified early in the discussions was that a thorough survey of the existing service would be needed as a high granularity of client customisation was known to be in place. This was a critical task and was used to identify the real world use of the Exchange service: identifying Mailboxes that did not comply with the Exchange/Active Directory regime, and isolating where users open other mailboxes’ or custom recipients and distribution lists are employed.
PMAS is an Nviron SystemCare customer. A service which provides a dedicated consultant delivering system maintenance and advice. This close working relationship, where an Nviron consultant has regular contact with the server and its infrastructure, proved invaluable to the project.
Building on this link the same consultant was chosen to deliver the upgrade and work in an environment and with colleagues whom he was already familiar.
Armed with this detailed information from the survey, a new Exchange 2003 server was installed on a resilient specification HP server. The data was migrated from the original mailboxes to the new service and a weekend exercise conducted to update user profiles and modifications. The 8 day project resulted in the successful migration of the PMAS Exchange system to the latest version of Microsoft Exchange server 2003.
The weekend data migration exercise was conducted using specialised and newly updated Microsoft developed utilities. These tools facilitated the data migration in addition to handling e-mail addresses and system details.
Following the successful migration of the data, the client desktops were individually visited to modify the Outlook profiles and re-apply the highly detailed permissions and access settings utilised by the users. The Nviron consultant also attended site on the Monday immediately afterwards, to be available for any problems that arose.
The new server infrastructure performed well. Pragmatically, where any access or delegation issues were not resolved during the weekend, the site support staff waited until they became evident, and attended when needed.
Post completion of the actual migration, go-live documentation was delivered by Nviron, this described the procedure and methodologies employed.
PMAS have not yet taken advantage of the advanced Outlook Web Access feature but are fully aware of its capabilities and usefulness. An element of the initial investigation included options available to them to deploy this service when needed. Choices based around ISA service publishing in addition to their own firewall were placed into the roadmap, leaving the site with a clearly defined service enhancement path.
Derek Heaton from the Police Mutual Assurance society commented:
“Having worked with Nviron for a number of years previously, it was a distinct advantage that they knew our systems and staff so well. This ensured that we thoroughly understood all the issues we would face with the migration and consequently enabled us to complete the entire project in the timescales planned and with no major issues.
Our e-mail system is now stable and equipped to cope with mobile and remote access through the Outlook Web Access feature. Although we are not using this currently we will be in the future to ensure our users are can keep in touch with their e-mail, irrespective of their location.”
FS32756