Wipro Technologies : Collaboration Simplified

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

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

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