Armfield, Harrison, and Thomas, Inc. (AH&T Inc.) is a professional services organization founded in 1921. AH&T is nationally known for its superior services, personnel, innovation, and value. AH&T’s operating system was not keeping up with business demands. Nortec successfully migrated the company’s 180 users to Microsoft Windows 2000 and resolved several business issues.
Background	AH&T Inc. provides insurance brokerage, risk management, and benefit professional services.

Business Situation
AH&T needed to incorporate industry standard applications into their mail system and operating system. AH&T needed to ensure that the integrity of all of their historical data stay intact. Not only did their business demand it but it was mandated by law. The migration had to have little impact on users. They have a large number of field staff that needed remote access to applications and a large region office that needed access to applications based at headquarters.

Implementation Approach
Nortec and AH&T reviewed the requirements and then decided to migrate from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange 5.5 and to Microsoft Windows 2000 at two locations, the headquarters in Leesburg, Virginia and their branch office in Seattle, Washington. Citrix Servers were used to satisfy the remote access needs either via dial-up or internet access. A VPN was deployed between Seattle and Leesburg to provide branch office connectivity. AH&T leveraged Nortec’s experience in both tool selection and implementation. Nortec handled the entire project from requirements analysis to final implementation and on-going support.

Business Results
AH&T’s new mail system supports industry standard applications. It also significantly improved reliability, stability and performance of the overall IT architecture. The web interface to Outlook and the Citrix servers provided a major improvement to field staff access to systems. The VPN provided a secure and effective solution for the remote office to connect to headquarters. All the business needs were met in a timely and cost effective manner.

Lessons Learned
By engaging experts early in the project, AH&T significantly lowered the risk of migrating from one operating system to another. Major pitfalls were avoided and best practices for data projection during platform migrations were employed. This allowed the entire process to be performed quickly and very low risk. AH&T’s internal IT resources were not sufficient to perform the migration and much of the on-going support. Nortec’s intimate understanding of both AH&T’s business and the new O/S design allowed them to put in place a long term support agreement. This provided AH&T with the level of support they expected at a very cost effective price.