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The city of Limerick, Ireland’s third largest city and leader of the open source adoption in the Irish local government, chose Zentyal to migrate to an open source email solution. This migration was the second phase of a larger migration process that aims at moving most of the IT infrastructure of the Limerick City Council to open source solutions, motivated by license costs savings and avoidance of vendor lock-in.
Zentyal was chosen as the technology solution because it integrated all the necessary functionality from Active Directory synchronization, Postfix and Zarafa as mail stack to Samba as file and printer sharing. It also integrated with the existing Microsoft infrastructure, allowing seamless and phased migration of the email services, with no disruption to the users: small teams were gradually transferred to the new email solution while the rest kept working within the existing environments.
“The most important challenge faced during the migration was to guarantee successful change management process. Both system administrators and users used to Windows environments needed to feel at ease with the new systems and be productive from day one” said Mihai Bilauca, Chief Information Officer at Limerick City Council. “We were extremely satisfied to notice that our system administrators did not need special training in Zentyal even if they did not have Linux background and Zarafa’s webmail was conceived as a web-based replacement for Outlook. All this helped greatly making the migration pretty straightforward.”
At the moment the email migration is fully completed and currently the IT Department of the Limerick City Council is deploying additional Zentyal-based services like file and printer sharing and testing HTTP proxy.