Duravit: From HCL Notes to Microsoft Cloud

For Duravit, migrating to the Microsoft Cloud was a key issue after Microsoft Teams was already introduced due to the pandemic, enabling many employees to work from home.

Existing of partially implemented M365 structure (due to the pandemic) 

Consolidation of existing Microsoft Teams and Outlook structure 

Distributed Notes infrastructure with many servers worldwide 

Migration of more than 2,500 worldwide users 

Cloud migration from HCL Notes to Microsoft Cloud using Migration Quest Notes to Exchange Migrator, Suite Migrator, and Quick Systems Manager 

Establishment of a SharePoint training environment 

Introduction of CodeTwo for centrally managed email signatures 

Modern IT infrastructure and high security in the Microsoft Cloud 

M365 is perceived as user-friendly by employees – high user acceptance 

Collaborative work as a central positive factor 

Optimized digital workplace – a platform for everything 

For many years, Duravit had been a user of IBM Notes / HCL Notes On-Premises with more than 250 applications based on Notes. Due to the pandemic, Duravit had to find a solution to expand their existing HCL Notes On-Premises structure to allow their employees to work remotely from home and enable location-independent work worldwide. Therefore, Duravit introduced Microsoft Teams. The implementation itself was quick and centrally controlled from Germany. To implement

their strategy of "one platform for everything" and dissolve their old Notes-based infrastructure, Duravit looked for an experienced partner. "We wanted a modern architecture with holistic integration into the Microsoft 365 environment," described Rainer Schmider, Head of Information Services at Duravit AG, the initial situation. With a holistic concept and experience in switching from HCL Notes to Microsoft, novaCapta was able to convince Duravit.

Since Microsoft Teams and Outlook had to be introduced quickly, not only did parallel worlds exist, but also an initial Microsoft tenant with existing identities. The goal was to merge the existing tenant and the identities contained therein with the new identities from the Active Directory. For this purpose, novaCapta created a script that automatically processed the merging of users. The existing structure was dissolved one after the other. "The merging of the cloud-only accounts with the local identities in Azure Active Directory worked very well", said Rainer Schmider, Head of Information Services at Duravit AG.

Duravit also decided to introduce CodeTwo email signatures, a tool for centrally distributing signatures, disclaimers, and automatic replies. Due to Duravit's many locations, more than 40 server signatures were predefined. With the migration, the tool was rolled out to all relocated employees in parallel. 

For the gradual migration of existing identities from the tenant, novaCapta established a coexistence of infrastructures. This enabled employees to continue working seamlessly with each other and accessing their data, no matter which system they were still anchored in. 

The migration was carried out at night to avoid interrupting or disrupting daily work. The large amount of data required the use of 10 migration servers during the peak of mailbox migration, on which the Quest Server was operated. In addition, the novaCapta Migration Manager was used to take over partially automated migration steps that were not covered by Quest. This enabled, among other things, the central conversion of mail routing and the revocation of Notes access after successful migration. The respective site communication was handled by Duravit itself. Thus, the global locations were informed and prepared for the upcoming move. 

"With Microsoft 365, we have a contemporary solution that is also perceived by employees as modern and user-friendly. The user acceptance is correspondingly high. In particular, collaborative work on documents - from anywhere - is repeatedly perceived positively". explains Rainer Schmider, Head of Information Services, Duravit AG. 

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