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