Wipro Technologies : Collaboration Simplified

A large enterprise typically has employees with diverse skills working for
client deliverables at different locations across the globe. And they often need
to collaborate with each other which means they either travel from one location
to the other or you have a collaboration solution in place that reduces travel
requirements. Wipro went for a collaboration solution that would allow web
conferencing amongst customers, partners and internal teams across different
regions and over the Internet. Instead of deploying different solutions that
overlap each other's scope and to avoid interoperability issues, they deployed
Microsoft solutions-Live Meeting, Live Communications Server 2005 Enterprise
with Federation (to allow communication with Yahoo Messenger, MSN Hotmail,
Google Talk and AOL) and SharePoint portal. This facilitates web-based meetings,
desktop sharing and presentations amongst all stakeholders. It also ensures that
users have up-to-date presence information on all team members and partners for
conducting meetings. For LCS 2005 implementation, Wipro used hardware load
balancer for high availability. The n-tier architecture allows the flexibility
to scale up with organization growth. As part of Green IT initiative, they've
used blade servers for power and space optimization. This is the first large
deployment for Microsoft in the APAC region, covering an enterprise of 60+
locations and affecting 85,000 users.

One of the biggest challenges while deploying the project was to roll out
clients across all systems without impacting a user's work. Also, the migration
of users from other web conferencing solutions required meticulous planning for
a seamless transition. Yet another challenge was to increase user awareness for
this service, as most of the times we find unused solutions lying on client
machines in the absence of a proper buy-in from users. There were also
challenges in scaling up the solution to include users across the globe. Lots of
customizations had to be done to scale up to a large user base.

For future, the company plans to upgrade LCS 2005 to allow A/V chat and as
part of Exchange Server 2007 they want to integrate voice messaging and
gradually move towards unified communications.

Jethin Chandran, Head - IT Infrastructure Planning