Unilever is a multinational corporation selling consumer goods including foods, beverages, cleaning agents and personal care products. Unilever is a dual-listed company consisting of Unilever NV in Rotterdam and Unilever PLC in London.

Unilever owns more than 400 brands including 11 “billion-dollar brands”, which each achieve annual sales in excess of €1 billion.

The move to Exchange Server 2010 was a much needed progression to support the increasing demands of capacity, mobility and to facilitate the centralisation of infrastructure to improve manageability, availability and reliability.

Working within a small team in a Project Management capacity on an aggressive global centralisation of infrastructure to the UK and move of user base to Exchange 2010. With a  user estate of 120,000 people, this was a challenging project for all involved but was driven top-down to succeed!

With Avanade as the primary supplier, the migration progressed at times moving in excess of 15,000 users per night whilst managing service delivery issues so as to minimise business impact.

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) was a key driver for Unilevers’ move to Exchange 2010 globally, to facilitate an ever increasing mobile workforce.

Other elements of the project including the replacement of the Blackberry infrastructure to align with the move and to facilitate the ever increasing need of an Agile workforce to have access to Bring Your Own Device.

The final aim of the project was to enable Unilever to allow access to over 20% of it’s workforce to bring their own device, whether it be tablet, smartphone on iOS or Android.

A huge step forward for a global mobile salesforce.