Case Study: StoneMor – From Scalix To Google Apps

StoneMor Partners L.P., headquartered in Levittown, Pennsylvania, is an owner and operator of cemeteries and funeral homes in the United States, with 252 cemeteries and 63 funeral homes in 26 states and Puerto Rico. StoneMor is the only publicly traded death care company structured as a partnership. They provide a broad scope of cemetery products and services, which are sold on both a pre-need (before death) and at-need (at death) basis, include: burial lots, lawn and mausoleum crypts,
burial vaults, caskets, memorials, and all services which provide for the installation of this merchandise. They employ 2500 people across 330 offices and have a well earned reputation in the death care industry in the United States through high quality and professional service. In June of 2010 StoneMor acquired five cemeteries and five funeral homes in Indiana, two cemeteries in Ohio and one cemetery in Michigan.

Business Need

Throughout the entire organisation, StoneMor had been using Scalix, a Linux based groupware solution, for their email and calendaring needs. At the outset, Scalix met the needs of the organisation for basic email and collaboration, however over time the system became overwhelming, with increased maintenance requirements, many unresolvable issues, stability problems and a lack of scalability. StoneMor needed to find an alternative, less complex solution that would meet the needs of their growing business.

StoneMor decided to investigate alternative platforms for their messaging and collaboration and decided on Google Apps based on the well defined security model, guaranteed availability, cost and brand recognition. Moving to Google Apps also meant that StoneMor could be sure their collaboration system would scale to their company needs whilst providing guaranteed uptime and availability.

StoneMor wanted to transfer the accounts of their 900 email users into the cloud to ensure complete continuity of service with no data loss. Problems arose when attempting to make use of the native Google Apps IMAP migration tool to migrate email
data over to Google Apps. StoneMor also needed to migrate all customer contacts and important and sensitive calendar information into their users accounts, something that was completely unsupported by any solution in the market.

Solution

Cloud Technology Solutions have worked with many organisations worldwide both independently and through partners to migrate organisation from Novell GroupWise and Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps and are recognised as the world’s
leading experts on migrations from Novell GroupWise to Google Apps, migrating over 2000 accounts to Google Apps every week. Cloud Technology Solutions migration tool, the Cloud Google Migrator, is the only recognised migration tool that supports both Novell GroupWise and Microsoft Exchange. Building on this well established platform, Cloud Technology Solutions built additional support for migration from Scalix to Google Apps, including email, calendar and contacts.

The services, support and advice provided by Cloud Technology Solutions allows entire organisations of any size to migrate to Google Apps efficiently and with no downtime across a range of platforms. As the Cloud Google Migrator had proven ability to reliably migrate to Google Apps on a large scale and due to the support in the product for complete migration of all data from
Scalix to Google Apps, it was a perfect fit for StoneMor’s requirements.

Frank Troiano, systems and network administrator for StoneMor said,

“Without Cloud Technology Solutions and their migration tool, it is hard to see how we could have migrated our user data into Google Apps at all. Further to this, their technical expertise, knowledge and experience of migration to Google Apps is first rate.”

After the problems with use of Google’s own IMAP migration tool, it was expected that the migration process would be quite painful and would require extensive manual administration. However, during early July 2010, StoneMor used the Cloud Google Migrator to migrate all 900 Scalix user accounts, including email, calendar and contacts to Google Apps in just 8 days.

Kelly Kleinfelder, Manager, Network and Data Center Operations at StoneMor enthused,

“The Cloud Google Migrator allowed us to not only move all of our user data into Google Apps, but to do so incredibly fast. It took what was initially an impossible task and made it extremely easy for us. Having familiar emails, contacts and calendar appointments gave our users the best possible impression of our new service. In addition Cloud Technology Solutions delivered outstanding customer service and support”

Benefits

Google Apps now provides StoneMor with a stable and scalable system to allow them to concentrate on business. The 25GB of available storage per user is far more than could have been provided with the previous solution and infrastructure and disaster recovery for email is now a non-issue. In addition, the range of connectivity possibilities and availability from every computer or mobile device ensures that all of StoneMor’s business travellers have easy access to their email.

Steve Kaye, CEO of Cloud Technology Solutions said,

“Migrating from Scalix to Google Apps was going to be challenging, however we knew that we would be able to support the process delivering a migration tool to seamlessly migrate StoneMor to Google Apps”

StoneMor are not alone. Every day thousands of companies are switching to Google Apps. Get in touch to see how we can help.