Microsoft Services Helps China Vanke Co., Ltd. Improve Internal Microsoft Product Environment to Better Meet Business Requirements

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1 Microsoft Services Helps China Vanke Co., Ltd. Improve Internal Microsoft Product Environment to Better Meet Business Requirements Country or Region: China Industry: Real estate Company Size: Large Microsoft Products and Services: Microsoft Services Premier Support Windows Server 2008 R2 Exchange Server 2010 SQL Server 2008 Lync Server 2013 Customer Background With the continued expansion of business and change of internal environment, the existing Microsoft product environment of Vanke Co., Ltd. was greatly challenged, especially in terms of database management, enterprise user management and mail system management. Account and Privilege Management There was no clear-cut separation of access authority, especially for administrators who have a great deal of authority, but lack of efficient supervision; Excessively fast business growth resulting in server performance and management bottlenecks; Difficulty in managing various business areas in varied ways; In the face of a complex architecture environment, there is a lack of standards for managing branch servers and systems. Mail System Management and User Experience Administrator privileges could not be split across platforms; Old clusters architecture led to frequent failures; Single point of failure existed in mail systems of various branches, which could not be addressed in a timely manner;

2 Customer Profile Founded in 1984, China Vanke Co., Ltd. began to engage in real estate in 1988, and was the second listed company on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in In more than two decades, Vanke has become the largest residential developer in China. Its sustained growth as well as standardized and transparent corporate governance structure has been widely recognized among investors. It has been put on Forbes 200 Best Small Companies List, Asia s 200 Best Under A Billion List, and Asia s Fab 50 Companies List, and presented with best corporate governance awards and best investor relations awards by internationally authoritative media such as IR Magazine. Its business covers 53 large and mediumsized cities in the Pearl River Delta region, the Yangtze River Delta region and the Bohai Economic Rim, as well as central and western parts of China. In the past three years, the average number of homes sold annually has exceeded 60,000. In 2011, sold floor space totaled million square meters and sales reached RMB billion. In 2012, sales exceeded RMB 140 billion, once again the largest in the global real estate industry. Huge investment in storage and backup did not pay off; Inability to deliver a more agile, flexible user experience in multi-platform access. Database Management Different business systems run on the same database platform; Inconsistency in database system versions; Database utilization is not balanced and database resources cannot be shared with each other. Business Needs Proposals to improve the environment The company wanted to leverage the advanced enterprise technology services offered by Microsoft Services to get advice on solutions that could meet their business requirement and improve the performance of Microsoft products within the whole enterprise in several ways: Management: Enable underlying association and differentiating management across different business areas, and improve the overall utilization by building a database resource pool. Solution Microsoft Services provided strong technical support and implementation recommendations for Microsoft product upgrades for China Vanke Co., Ltd. In addition, Microsoft Services customized related services for China Vanke Co., Ltd. and arranged experienced technical support engineers to provide high-quality technical support services, which not only ensured a smooth upgrade of Microsoft products, but also guaranteed business continuity and improved the investment value of their software. Security: Provide granular division of privilege and reduce operational risks through detailed auditing. Performance: Meet the needs of database management and mailbox expansion by building infrastructure, storage, resource pool, etc. Availability: Improve high availability and disaster recovery across multiple corporate sites. User experience: Deliver flexible user access and rich user experience.

3 Customer Benefits By upgrading and improving the Windows Server, the enterprise is equipped with a more stable foundation platform. Sound solution proposals provide the enterprise with high quality services tailored to their unique needs, so that the key nodes are protected during implementation. The improvement of Exchange Server makes the enterprise mailbox more scalable, available and secure. By building the database resource pool, the business challenges in database management and overall utilization have been well addressed. Solution In line with the standards of advanced enterprise technology services, Microsoft Services provided Vanke Co., Ltd. with a detailed plan for improving their Microsoft platform, including four stages - planning, validation, deployment and consolidation. The plan reduced fully the probability of faults occurring on the Microsoft platform and its operational risks, and improved product utilization. Planning This included defining the scope of services and resources required for the project by analyzing the current Microsoft environment of Vanke Co., Ltd. and their requirements. The team worked out a plan for product upgrade based on the final requirement analysis report and health check reports to make adequate preparations for the specific technical implementation. Infrastructure Improvement Plan With the stable Windows Server 2008 R2 X64 as the new domain controller system, its new "Read-Only Domain Controller" function is used for domain environment management and authentication of branches. Privilege and Management Improvement Plan To meet the requirement for environment expansion, the team planned to raise the domain functional level under the same domain architecture, optimize the objects in the domain, reorganize the structure according to business areas, and support policybased management of different snap-ins in a highly individual and targeted manner.

4 Mail System Architecture Improvement Plan By enabling inter-site fault tolerance on mail servers and distinguishing between different inbound mail paths for different roles, Microsoft Services not only made new plans regarding the mail outbound ports for the head office and branches, but also minimized the possibility of failure. Mailbox Storage and Backup Plan According to the monitoring data and user growth (estimate of 30%), Microsoft Services decided to make a copy of all databases across different sites in the mail system of Vanke Co., Ltd. so that when the master copy fails, the passive copy is automatically activated for fault tolerance. Also, in order to keep data available, daily incremental copies and a weekly full copy have been planned. Anti-virus and Anti-spam Plan In order to ensure the safe operation of the mail system, Microsoft Services recommended deployment of Forefront Protection for Exchange and mail gateway in the server to support multi-filtering of external mails while improving the security of s and reducing the possibility of virus and spam intrusion. Database Management Improvement Plan There are multiple sets of business systems running on the SQL Server database platform within the enterprise. After years of development, problems such as inconsistent database version, unbalanced utilization of databases and inability to share database resources have arisen. In order to improve the situation, Microsoft conducted a number of discussions with Vanke, and finally proposed to build a database resource pool.

5 Validation Prior to formal deployment, in order to offer a viable low-risk deployment, Microsoft Services provided Vanke Co., Ltd. with the reporting for a series of tests such as Active Directoryrelated application compatibility test, Exchange storage stress test and Exchange user load stress test. These verified the feasibility and integrity of the preliminary planning and design based on the actual data and results, and led to the finalized architecture and server configuration. Deployment In the actual deployment, Microsoft Services sent professional technical support staff to work with Microsoft's partners to upgrade the Microsoft platform for Vanke Co., Ltd. They provided designated technical personnel at different levels to address the complex issues in the deployment process, and provided different resources to help with the deployment. Consolidation After the completion of the deployment and upgrade, through performance analysis of Active Directory and Exchange Server, Microsoft Services confirmed whether the deployment and upgrade met all preliminary requirements, whether the numerical parameters were normal, and if there was any failure. Customer Benefits Because of the advanced enterprise technology services, Vanke Co., Ltd. not only reduced the cost of mail storage, but also improved the scalability of their infrastructure platform so that the Microsoft products they use can meet their current business needs while laying a solid foundation for future environment expansion. By upgrading and improving the Windows Server, the enterprise is equipped with a more stable infrastructure platform. Sound solution proposals provide the enterprise with high quality services tailored to their unique needs, so that the key nodes are protected during implementation. The improvement of Exchange Server makes the enterprise mailbox more scalable, available and secure. By building the database resource pool, the business challenges in database management and overall utilization have been well addressed.