So the company chose Azaleos managed services for Exchange. The option called for Mediq to buy hardware and license management software from Azaleos, but the service provider uses it to monitor and manage the Exchange/Outlook system.

It also gives Mediq the flexibility to place gear where it wants to and to call on Azaleos for help if it's needed. "You never know what you're going to run into," Witte says. "You need a partner in that to help you." Mediq wound up buying eight Sun servers deployed redundantly on company-owned sites, including one just for U.S. properties as well as a disaster-recovery site in the Netherlands.

Choosing Exchange/Outlook 2010 as the standard platform was important because it works with Microsoft collaboration and communication platforms such as SharePoint and Lync. "We didn't just want this to be an email project," he says.

Mediq still has to migrate those offices with versions and service packs that don't match the standard the company set for itself, but it can do that a piece at a time. Right now, about 90% of the systems have been migrated.

The company now includes this email migration as part of its plan for transforming newly purchased companies into Mediq companies within 100 days. With experience, the IT staff has boiled down the likely scenarios to just four: exporting and importing .pst message files; interconnecting Exchange servers using the Quest migration tool; migrating Domino email; and all the rest including platforms, he says.