Case Study - Hosted Email

Andy Ellis is a director of Ellis Grant Ltd, a professional service firm providing outsourced litigation costs services to solicitors throughout England and Wales.  Andy explains here how his involvement with Accesspoint began.

"So this is where we were with IT at the end of 2008.  We had begun to regard it as a necessary evil instead of a business asset.  Certainly the biannual major upgrades required to keep pace were soaking up a lot of money yet they provided increasingly short-term fixes.  We were rapidly losing our enthusiasm for technology.

And if there was one application that sucked the life out of our system it was email - Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 - a behemoth that caused our network to fall over all too frequently. 

But like so many businesses we really needed it to work.  If we had to rank our applications in terms of importance of to the day-to-day running of our business, email would always occupy the top slot.

What we housed, however,  was an enterprise application that had been disproportionately expensive to purchase on a per user basis.  It was not being managed actively by our IT support firm.  To make matters worse it was being run over a creaky network and was connected to the outside world via a bog-standard ADSL line.

The thought of being dragged down the traditional path of upgrading hardware and software yet again was singularly unattractive.  It was going to be a big one just to stand still.  The shopping list looked like this; 

• New server for Exchange
• New Server software
• Upgraded Exchange Server and client software (2003 to 2007)
• More robust back-up
• Stronger connection to the internet
• The IT resource to make it happen
• A more active IT maintenance regime.

It was a daunting list and we needed to find another way.   With the guidance of the team that is now Accesspoint we did just that.

The key was beefing up our ADSL to a leased line and removing the Exchange Server from our network to a service hosted by Star.  Within a few weeks we were able to turn the problem on its head and take advantage of the following benefits;

• Scalable monthly per head subscription instead of a huge initial capital outlay
• The improved performance of Exchange Server 2007 including;

1. Windows SharePoint Services (no more emailing around huge documents as attachments)
2. Vastly improved interface for Outlook Web Access (if all else fails)

• Outlook 2007 client for each mailbox user
• BlackBerry Enterprise Server
• iPhone and Windows Mobile 6 support with full "push" services
• Automatic back-up of Exchange mailboxes (no more tyranny of the tapes)
• Vastly improved anti-spam and anti-virus control with MessageLabs
• Less traffic because the MessageLabs filtering takes place on Star's side of the firewall
• No more 3^rd party IT support fees for Exchange

The Accesspoint team made sure the change was managed with the minimum fuss and disruption and saved further costs by archiving out oldest emails before the migration. 

They managed the refreshingly short project on our behalf, including switching over to the leased line and optimising our network's performance after migration by making best use of the extra space created by the removal of Exchange.

It's still early days but we have had no drop in the Exchange service barring a minor equipment fault with BT that was diagnosed and rectified within two hours - it's faster and stronger by far than the previous set-up and the rest of our network is running with complete comfort.

 "Cloud computing" to me is a misnomer for what is happening in IT.  We know exactly where our Exchange is being hosted and managed.  I've been escorted round Star's data centre and seeing is indeed believing.  Any concerns I had about reliability and security were quickly removed.

I can now understand why all computing will soon work like this.  I fully expect every IT investment we make in the foreseeable future will be "thin-client" or web-based.  

Working with Accesspoint has been so successful that we have now joined forces with them on the development of web-based business applications and niche litigation costs applications, taking our firm into a completely new and exciting direction."