Coca-Cola Bottling Company migrates 1,100 users from IBM Notes to Office 365 in one weekend

Third largest US Coca-Cola bottler partners with Dell and InfraScience to make the switch

Coca-Cola Bottling Company United (CCBCU), the third largest Coca-Cola bottler in the US, has migrated 1,100 of its users from IBM Notes to Microsoft Office 365 in one weekend.

The firm partnered with Dell and IT consultancy InfraScience in order to make the switch from IBM Notes and Domino as well as Notes applications, but according to Dell, CCBCU needed to move to a common platform in order to better collaborate with others within the Coca-Cola ecosystem.

CCBCU wanted to maintain co-existence with Notes applications, BlackBerry support in the cloud and Microsoft Lync migration from IBM Sametime.

The company aimed to complete the migration of user mailboxes and 2TB of data to a hybrid Office 365 environment over one weekend to ensure that end user productivity was not hampered. It wanted users to be able to still have full access to mailboxes, calendars and public folders throughout the migration.

"The weekend cutover went exactly as planned, and our employees were able to come to work on Monday with Office 365 up and running," said Michael Neighbors, director of IT at Coca-Cola Bottling Company United.

CCBCU used Dell's Migrator for Notes to Exchange, Coexistence Manager for Notes and MessageStats products for the migration, and Neighbors claimed that the process was "seamless and simple".

"It has achieved our primary objective of improving our collaboration systems and staying closely connected and integrated with the other bottlers," he said.

"We are a growing company and moving to Office 365 with the help of Dell and InfraScience has been advantageous for us in many ways. Not only have we been able to easily on-board new employees using Office 365, but we have reduced the administrative effort required to manage the collaboration systems day to day," he added.