Champion Air is a full service charter operator based in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota, and is the largest dedicated provider of charter airlift in the airline industry. It is their goal to provide a superior experience that is the result of exceeding their customers’ expectations in every way.

 

The airline currently operates a fleet of sixteen Boeing 727-200 aircraft and serves a wide variety of customers that includes major tour wholesalers, professional and college sports teams, the Department of Defense, and corporate incentive groups.

 

Champion Air was running an older version of Novell and GroupWise. An upgrade was imminent, but due to the mixed Windows and Novell environment, Champion Air did not want to face the financial costs that a pure Novell environment would bring.

 

Rich Rhodes, Champion Air’s Director of IT said, “Our IT department was finding it increasingly difficult to support a mixed environment, particularly with the new Microsoft technologies.”

 

Champion Air decided that the best solution for them was to migrate from GroupWise to Exchange. They consulted with Larry Phelps, Solbrekk VP of Sales, and Jerry Weiler, Solbrekk Director of Operations, in evaluating which version of Exchange to purchase and install. Solbrekk worked with Champion Air to create a scope of work, timeline and project plan. They also discussed potential pit falls and determined solutions to overcome those pit falls should they occur.

 

The implementation of the solution was a team effort with Jason Erickson, Solbrekk Sr. Network Engineer, working on site to help work the plan. Jason spent two days installing the Quest GroupWise to Exchange migration software tools. Champion Air’s internal IT staff, Joe Tiez and Scott Henricks, worked diligently to make the corporate desktops and Citrix environments ready for the migration. ZENworks, Novell client, and other software needed to be removed to ready desktops and servers for the migration. Champion Air’s lead developer, Tim Haug, worked to ensure all custom applications were also ready for the migration.

 

Champion Air’s internal staff also performed internal user training, server setup, Exchange Server installation and base configuration. Jason Erickson was utilized to finalize the Exchange configuration, work a plan for PDA phone synchronization with Exchange, and help with errors that would occur during the final migration.

 

Rich Rhodes said, “Champion Air realized a savings of $30,000 in software costs by moving to Microsoft vs. Novell. We also saved $2,250 in labor by having the project completed two days earlier than budgeted. The migration was seamless. We had a solid plan, combined with a lot of work at the front end, which resulted in a fairly easy migration on the day of the migration. Having no down-time is a big deal for an airline, and that was what was provided, a complete migration with no down-time for a single user.”

 

Rich went on to state, “The all Microsoft environment has increased desktop and network performance. Our help desk calls have dropped due to the streamlined environment. Even greater efficiencies will be realized once users start to use the application and operating system integration that Outlook provides.”

 

Rich concluded by saying, “Champion Air sought two other proposals on this project from other vendors. We would have spent at least $15,000-$40,000 more had we used another solution provider. Solbrekk did a wonderful job estimating the needs for this project, quoting the necessary hours, and understanding the abilities of Quest’s migration tool.”