Top Ten Reasons to Move to Exchange Server 2010 in 2010
As we start
the New Year with Exchange 2010 in market, I wanted to
share more of the stories we are hearing from our customers. At launch, we
highlighted how a few of our
customers, Lifetime Products, Morgan Keegan and Global Crossing are utilizing the new features in
Exchange 2010. But, now with a couple months since launch, it is
incredibly rewarding to hear how so many customers are benefiting from Exchange
2010.
In the spirit of a top 10 list for the
New Year, here are 10 quotes from some of your fellow IT Pros that speak to how
Exchange 2010 is helping them and their companies work better:
1. Offering Larger Mailboxes While
Lowering Storage Costs : Cell C used the improved I/O performance of
Exchange 2010 to purchase less expensive storage that enabled supporting large
mailboxes at low cost. "We were looking at a very expensive storage area
network (SAN) solution with third-party archiving, and our work with Microsoft
Services consultants helped us to identify this DAS SATA solution, which costs
about one-fifth as much," said Andrew McNair, Wintel Infrastructure
Manager, Cell C says. That represents a cost
savings of about R1.8 million (U.S.$230,000).
2. Easy Online Mailbox Moves: MedcoEnergi
wanted to improve availability for its increasingly mobile work force. Moving
mailboxes between databases was time-consuming and required taking users
offline. As a result, MedcoEnergi administrators worked at night or on weekends
to avoid downtime. "With Exchange Server 2010, we can move mailboxes during
office hours-in fact, I was accessing my own e-mail during a migration and I
didn't even realize it had happened," said Cecep Saefudin,
Manager-Infrastructure Services, Medco Energi Internasional.
3.
Improved e-Discovery and
Multi-mailbox Search: Binaria expects the new multi-mailbox search
feature to help specialized users, such as compliance officers and auditors,
improve their productivity. "We need to be able to search e-mail messages for
legal reasons. In Chile, we have a finance code that requires us to keep
all e-mail messages for a minimum of five years. It is a massive volume. We
used to spend one or two days looking for information we needed for legal
requirements. Now, with multi-mailbox search in Exchange Server 2010, we can
find what we need in an hour or less. This is exactly what we were looking for,
and it's a key benefit for us," said Julio Sandoval, Head of Middleware,
Binaria. That's a 90 percent improvement in discovery time for Binaria.
4.
Save Costs with Server
Consolidation: By consolidating multiple messaging environments into one
high-availability solution, the City of Växjö is cutting IT costs. The city
estimates that by deploying Exchange Server 2010 mailbox servers with
direct-attached storage and SATA hard disk drives, it has saved more than
$400,000 in hardware costs compared to the cost of deploying a SAN. It will
also save up to $110,500 in labor costs through simplified administration.
Moreover, although the city purchased new server computers for its Exchange
Server 2010 solution, it expects an immediate return on investment in both
licensing and hardware costs when it eliminates the existing six servers and
the backup tape solutions running in its old environment. "Exchange Server 2010
is a much more affordable solution because we can use regular servers with
direct-attached storage. So in addition to improving availability, we have
saved a lot of money," said Per Andersson, IT Manager at the City of Växjö.
5. Continuous Availability: Using
Exchange Server 2010, Lion Nathan will improve its failover process and
ability to support its new disaster recovery center. The company is
implementing database availability group (DAG), a new capability that combines
on-site and off-site data replication into a single high availability solution
that helps protect its Exchange environment from downtime. "Because e-mail is
such an important part of our business, the more redundancy and site resiliency
we can build in, the better. With Exchange Server 2010, failover or switchover
becomes an easily definable and executable process. Often the failover can be
performed without users knowing that it occurred," said Brett Watkins, Systems
Manager, Lion Nathan.
6. Improved User Productivity:
will also be able to increase the size of employee mailboxes to 2 GB while also
increasing the overall performance of the mailboxes. With access to their
inboxes from the Outlook desktop client and Outlook Web App using the browser
of their choice, the employees will have more flexibility in how they work.
Finally, users can take advantage of features like conversation view and faster
search capabilities to help them find the information they need more quickly. "Users
will spend much less time searching and categorizing items in their inboxes,
which will help them be more productive," says Valentin Dominko, Head of IT
Infrastructure, Mobitel.
7. Enhanced Role Based Access Control
(RBAC): Carnival Cruise Lines plans to use the Role Based Access
Control (RBAC) feature in Exchange Server 2010 to provide permissions to groups
within its organization and better distribute management. Using RBAC,
administrators can give teams such as security or help desk the rights to
perform administrative tasks that align closely with their roles and areas of
responsibility. "We have a widely distributed management model. The
security team handles mailboxes and distribution lists. The operations team
handles the day-to-day functionality of Exchange Server to keep it running.
When we implement unified messaging, we'll have a communications team
responsible for that. Having RBAC roles within Exchange Server and the ability
to customize them will help us to distribute administrative functionality in a
more granular fashion than we could in the past," said Tom DeLuca, Supervisor,
End-User Engineering, Carnival Cruise Lines.
8. Improved System Uptime: Telecom Italia will use the new Database Availability
Group feature to improve availability, and it will replace its five storage
area networks with lower cost direct-attached storage. "With Exchange Server
2010, we expect to have better than 99.99 percent uptime for our employees.
Overall, we will have much better availability than before," said Maria Pia
Abbagnano, Corporate Internet Messaging Services Manager, Telecom Italia. As a result, the company expects to
save €350,000 (U.S.$520,000) annually in maintenance costs.
9. Greater Compliance: The Cell C IT
department will use improved compliance features in Exchange Server 2010 such
as retention capabilities and multi-mailbox search to reduce the amount of time
spent on compliance activities "With Exchange Server 2010, we can give the
auditors permission to pull mail out of mailboxes themselves. Now the
nine hours a month I spend on compliance will be cut down to zero," said Andrew
McNair, Wintel Infrastructure Manager, Cell C.
10. Easy to use Retention Policies: Using
retention policies in Exchange Server 2010, administrators can apply retention
settings to specific items or folders in a mailbox, at a per-individual or
per-organization level. The retention polices applied to messages appear inside
the message, so employees can more easily identify when an e-mail is set to
expire and, if necessary, move it to another folder to retain it beyond the
expiration date. Employees can also set their own retention policies for any
folder in the mailbox. "We can provide guidelines about what constitutes
important messages they need to keep, but the technology really helps us by
providing these retention policies," said Paul Sanderson, Technical Lead, British Sky Broadcasting Group.
2009 was a challenging year for
everyone, but it is exciting to see that Exchange 2010 organizations are
improving everyday productivity and meeting the demand to do more with
less.
If you haven't done so already, the
Exchange Server 2010 bits are available for download now. As always, keep the
feedback coming!
Julia White
Director, Exchange Product Management