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Traidcraft's mission is to fight poverty through trade, practising and promoting approaches to trade that help poor people in developing countries transform their lives. Established in 1979 as a Christian response to poverty, Traidcraft combines a trading company and a development charity.


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With a complex business model and ICT infrastructure, Synthesis IT supports 160 users at their Head Office in Gateshead, Traidcraft.

Their Microsoft Exchange 5.5 single server was old, overstretched and struggling with capacity. Other projects and external forces meant that the client needed to upgrade this single server to Exchange cluster within - 1 week of the 2007 version being released and without the availability of supporting Microsoft documentation on 2007 clustering.

Due to international business process requirements, this upgrade had to be carried out in a live environment, keeping 160 mailboxes available to users throughout. We managed the project by firstly upgrading the Exchange 5.5 server to an Exchange 2000 single server, to ensure a robust upgrade route. We then built the cluster in the Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR) method, which was (at that time) brand new to market. Following this we installed the Exchange 2007 cluster for testing offline whilst the original server was still operational, creating test mailboxes in the original single server and then testing the import to the cluster.

On confirmation of successful test results, we brought the cluster into the domain and stepped it up online, moved the remainder of the mailboxes to the cluster according to a timescale agreed with the client, and downgraded the original server, finally removing it from the domain.


Testimonial from Terry Attwater - IT Manager

"Synthesis IT has proven to be an invaluable partner to Traidcraft over the last 5 years and continue to work very closely with us covering a number of IT Projects. Their technical ability and customer focus has allowed us to take on a number of new major IT projects, with the confidence of knowing we have their full support throughout."


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