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DHV

DHV is a leading international consultancy and engineering group that develops innovative solutions and services for markets such as transport and infrastructure, building and manufacturing, water, telecommunications, spatial planning and the environment.

To achieve better flexibility, stability and security of its IT system and to enable closer employee collaboration between a number of sites throughout The Netherlands and Belgium, DHV wanted to upgrade its existing Windows NT-based environment to the Windows 2000 platform. Capgemini were approached to help realise this aim.

Situation Headquartered in Amersfoort, The Netherlands, DHV has over 4,000 professionals developing innovative concepts for the markets it operates in. The company’s areas of expertise include service provision at major airports, coastal developments, industrial cleanrooms and in developing intelligent transport systems.

DHV’s services include management consultancy, design and engineering, project management, contract management and operational management offering solutions to complex issues related to the living environment, which generally require multidisciplinary approaches.

With its access to internal and external multidisciplinary networks, DHV is able to lever knowledge horizontally throughout its organisation, as well as with clients and partners. This process is the product not only of its positive attitude towards cooperation and networking, but also its comprehensive IT and knowledge systems, which it has developed in partnership with Capgemini assisted DHV to upgrade its existing Windows NT-based system to a uniform infrastructure based on the Windows 2000 platform. The overall aim of migrating to Windows 2000 was to achieve closer collaboration between a number of work sites that were spread across multiple locations by integrating e-mail and calendar applications for scheduling meetings and by giving staff the ability to work from any site. The stability of its software needed to improve and DHV hoped to increase security and reduce its maintenance effort by gaining greater control over its desktop environment.

Capgemini had the overall project responsibility for the design, test and migration of the DHV environment.

Jolanta Kulicki, Corporate Information and Knowledge Officer at DHV, says: “The old system could not cope with the exchange of documents between Office 95 and Office 97, whilst Office 95 also had limited integration with the Internet and Intranet. The stability of Windows 95 was not optimal, whilst the NT domain structure didn’t have the flexibilities to cooperate between DHV employees and business groups in other locations.”

Also, much of the hardware already in use was ready for an upgrade as it was more than three years old and DHV were suffering with performance and capacity problems. “We realised that implementing a whole new software and hardware infrastructure would solve these problems,” adds Kulicki.

Solution

The complexity of the project soon became apparent when Capgemini realised that it meant a migration of both client and server software for over 3,000 users across more than 20 locations.

“The system also had over 60 domain controllers/servers and two SAN’s,” says René Scholten, Senior Consultant, Capgemini. “The challenge was to make sure these were reduced through server and domain consolidation. Also the desktop stability, manageability and ease of maintenance had to be improved to lower the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).”

This involved a three-phase project that included the architecture design, the creation of a test environment and the migration to Windows 2000.

One of the major design goals was to create a system that would allow greater collaboration across a number of sites for DHV employees. Previously, employees had been using a combination of Exchange 4.0 and 5.5. To allow employees to synchronise e-mail and calendars Exchange 2000 Server was chosen as the uniform messaging platform, says Scholten. “Capgemini was responsible for the overall architecture of the domain and Exchange environment, including the sizing of the hardware,” he adds.

When Capgemini began the design of the domain there was the possibility of other country subsidiaries of DHV, such as Portugal, joining the infrastructure. As a result they had to design a domain that was flexible enough to accommodate this possibility. So a top-level domain was created as was a sub-domain for The Netherlands and Belgium. “The advantages of this new environment is that it offers the ability to manage the whole environment in both a centralised and decentralised manner,” says Scholten.

As a result of the changes to the domain structure, a naming convention for Directory objects and hardware was introduced simplifying the management of groups, organisational units and different types of hardware within the organisation. A system of Group Policies was also established across the organisation for ease of management, to configure the desktops in a uniform way, and to establish greater security settings.

Once the design and test phases were completed, and the Microsoft technologies decided upon, Capgemini were faced with a complex migration both technically and logistically. “We created and built a new environment that worked alongside the old environment, this enabled us to roll-out the Windows 2000 platform to each of the different sites of DHV in turn,” says Scholten.

First came the creation of the central environment at the company headquarters in The Netherlands. Capgemini then converted all of the local domains throughout the country and also two sites in Belgium to the new environment. “This involved a project manager visiting each site up to six weeks before the migration was due to start to explain the process to the users,” says Scholten. “Users were required to complete a quick course to fully update them on the changes and to ensure they would be comfortable using the new system.”

While users were on the courses to familiarise themselves with the new environment their hardware was replaced or upgraded, the new software was installed, their mailboxes were migrated and the user and company data was copied to the new environment.

Around 40 people were migrated to the Windows 2000 platform at one time with the whole migration project of 2,500 users taking under 12 months to complete. During the migration Capgemini also worked closely with the hardware vendor, Compaq, and the training institute, Global Knowledge Network.

“The complexity of the project was in the amount of users, the amount of locations and the fact the people would be able to continue working while others were on courses or already migrated. Now, with Office 2000 on the desktop and Windows 2000 as the operating system DHV employees are able to collaborate effectively in a stable and secure environment,” says Scholten.

Along with the design and development of a new IT infrastructure, Capgemini also cooperated in reducing over 800 applications to around 500. All these applications were installed and tested in a Windows 2000 environment to ensure proper functioning after the migration.

Benefits The switch from a number of different systems based on Windows NT to a uniform Windows 2000 platform has allowed DHV to achieve their main project goal of creating greater collaboration between its different groups and business users.

“Our goal of improving the exchange of information between the different sites has been met, as has the ability to implement new corporate applications quickly and easily,” says Kulicki. “DHV has been extremely pleased with the way the new system has performed. Our new workflow management processes for example, which we have been able to implement since adopting the Windows 2000 platform, have enabled us to achieve enormous cost savings in our business processes alone.”

Through a new desktop environment DHV has solved problems of desktop manageability, has created a stable and flexible environment through the ability to provide regular anti-virus updates and has also lowered maintenance costs by over 10 per cent as a result of migrating to Windows 2000.

“As well as achieving greater cost savings and improving the e-mail and information exchange environment, the flexibility and stability of Windows 2000 has further impressed DHV. This has given our employees greater confidence when dealing with customers and partners and they are using the Windows 2000 platform to achieve greater collaboration and working practices,” says Kulicki.

“Capgemini were aware of the present situation of the DHV IT infrastructure, had strong project management capabilities and were acquainted with Microsoft products. This is the reason we chose Capgemini and they created a system that exactly fitted our needs,” concludes Kulicki.