The Company – Forever 21    

The year was 1984 and a 900 square ft. shop on Figueroa St. in Los Angeles opened for business.  The store was called Fashion 21.  By the end of the first year, sales had risen from $35,000 to $700,000.  The founder reinvested his success by opening new stores every six months eventually changing the name to Forever 21.

Opening 30 new stores annually, Forever 21 has grown to over 145 stores including its flagship stores, Forever XXI, in 25 states and Canada. 

The Situation

Forever 21 had a relatively antiquated, but relatively stable messaging infrastructure built on Exchange Server 5.5.  Due to the distributed nature of their environment with close to 150 locations, the existing Exchange 5.5 environment was quickly becoming inadequate to handle their many locations properly. 

The Solution

The I.T. management at Forever 21 was extremely interested in the features of Exchange Server 2003, such as the new and improved Outlook Web Access, as well as RPC over HTTP or “Outlook Remote” as we’ve dubbed it.  Because Exchange Server 2003 was designed with this distributed architecture in mind, it was the perfect solution for Forever 21’s messaging needs. 

Cal Net was engaged to build their servers from the operating system up, and was tasked with the design and implementation of the new Exchange environment.  In order to take a phased approach due to Forever 21 locations being open 7 days a week, we recommended that initially the Exchange 5.5 and Exchange 2003 environment coexist.  After this architecture was in place, the Forever 21 staff was trained on how to move mailboxes from the old Exchange environment to the new.  After the bulk of this process was complete, Cal Net was available for post deployment support for the few times Forever 21’s staff ran into small issues. 

The reason Forever 21 chose Cal Net Technology Group

Forever 21 had other options when it came to which organization they chose to spearhead their Exchange Migration.  At the end of the day, Forever 21 chose Cal Net based on many similar migrations we had successfully completed.  As they were pleasantly surprised, this migration happened in a fraction of the time that was initially budgeted, thus making a large messaging initiative “a drop in the bucket” with regard to cost.

The Company – Haas Automation   

The largest machine tool builder in the United States, Haas Automation manufactures a full line of CNC vertical and horizontal machining centers, CNC lathes, rotary tables and 5C indexers. Haas machine tools and rotary products are built to deliver higher accuracy, repeatability and durability than any other machine tools on the market.

From its beginnings in 1983, Haas Automation has always produced top-quality products at affordable prices. By relying on volume sales rather than per-unit profits to build the company, Haas delivers more standard features, high-tech innovations and rock-solid engineering than perhaps any other CNC manufacturer in the world – and at better prices!

The Situation

Faced with an aging infrastructure, along with the desire to run new applications such as SharePoint Portal Server, Microsoft Project Server, along with other state of the art applications, Haas NT 4.0 domain environment was in serious need of an overhaul. With a large base of workstations and users, managing the network had become cumbersome and stretched their limited internal resources thin, as application installations and upgrades were entirely manual processes. With several remote offices and dozens of remote users, the preferred method of remote access to email was Outlook Web Access, which in Exchange 5.5 was not as user-friendly and lacked many features that are included with Exchange 2003.

The Solution

Haas knew it was time to move from their Windows NT 4.0 and Exchange 5.5 environment to a Windows 2003 and Exchange 2003 Enterprise environment.  Haas management selected Cal Net Technology Group to perform the daunting task of converting their platform to Active Directory and Exchange 2003. Cal Net’s Project Management team developed an implementation plan, which was performed by Cal Net’s staff of engineers over the course of two months. With virtually zero downtime, all systems were converted and all of the feature-rich services of Active Directory had been successfully implemented including Group Policies, Automated Package Deployment, Distributed File System and File Replication Services, as well as Exchange features including the new Outlook Web Access and RPC over HTTP.

The reason Haas Automation chose Cal Net Technology Group

Haas Automation’s IT management understood the need to implement Windows and Exchange 2003, and sought a technology partner that they trusted to perform the project in the smoothest possible manner. After discussing their needs with several providers, Haas selected Cal Net based on the strength of our references and sample project plans, which illustrate our commitment to professionalism and careful planning, which assured them that their project would be successfully completed on time and within budget.