The Arbeitskreis für Aus- und Weiterbildung Landau in der Pfalz e.V. (AAW, an NGO working group that provides job education for adults) has successfully migrated its almost 300 users to grommunio. Together with the grommunio partner enbiz engineering and business solutions from Kaiserslautern, grommunio’s standard migration tools helped to transfer the data from the existing groupware. Although there were three main reasons for the switch, the working group has gained much more than originally thought.
Forced migration
The Arbeitskreis für Aus- und Weiterbildung Landau is a non-profit educational institution that offers training courses and projects for public clients and public funding bodies. Since 1981, it has aimed to make a competent contribution to the professional and social participation of affected people under the motto “From person to person, know-how with a system”. The AAW offers vocational qualification, professional coaching, language and integration courses, as well as further training in accordance with the European Social Fund ESF.
The AAW didn’t actually intend to change its systems, the pressure to act came more from outside: “Our previous software provider adopted a new strategy at the beginning of 2024, the new business model is virtually cloud-only and would have meant significantly higher costs for us,” explains Thomas Kunz, Head of IT at the AAW. Because the Microsoft 365 option would also have been five to ten times more expensive than the solution now implemented with grommunio, “grommunio’s offer simply fitted the planned budget better”.
More value for the money
This made the range of functions and performance all the more surprising for the AAW: with grommunio, a single server at the provider Hetzner is sufficient for the expected approx. 10,000 emails per week. However, grommunio comes with a significantly higher range of functions than the previous software, including chat, video conferencing, file sync and much more. This fits in perfectly with AAW’s claim, which can also be found on the website: “We favor communication structures in the form of regular team meetings and employee discussions in order to create the highest possible transparency and participation for our joint actions”
More efficient, faster, less work
But it was also the modern admin web interface that convinced the customer AAW. Cumbersome sneaker administration on the client is a thing of the past because grommunio connects its clients completely without Outlook plug-ins or registry entries.
In the case of the working group, there were additional positive factors The previous setup at AAW was described by Florian Rudolph from grommunio partner enbiz as “historically grown, just as you often find it in companies and organizations.” This worked, but it was not always efficient and up-to-date: for example, creating a new email account required around five separate processes, partly because no central directory was used. “Thanks to grommunio, this is now just a single step, a few mouse clicks in the browser.”
Details of the migration
For the email migration, enbiz deployed the grommunio migration tools to export the information from the database of the previously used Zarafa server and then imported it into grommunio. Other data (e.g. the calendars) was read out using our own scripts and transferred via CSV (comma separated values, a text-based format for data exchange). The openness is very helpful here: “You quickly realize the value of open source and open standards, it makes things much easier,” explains enbiz Managing Director Dariusch Purkabiri.
Small, but typical
Even though the setup at the AAW in Landau with several hundred users is a rather small use case for grommunio, it is typical of the added value that grommunio partners can provide. In addition to the classic drop-in replacement for Microsoft Exchange, migrations from other open source groupwares currently account for a large proportion of customers, increasingly also in education and training organizations and NGOs.
enbiz engineering and business solutions
As an IT system house and consulting company, enbiz engineering and business solutions gmbh from Kaiserslautern supports many satisfied customers in Germany across all sectors. In addition to the successful implementation of IT projects, the company focuses on holistic consulting in the areas of IT and information security.
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