The company’s customers are often global organisations operating, predominantly from the Telecom, Media and Technology sector. The nature of RVWL’s market makes telephone and web based meetings an essential part of the way it deals with the challenges of time zones and the decentralised locations of the decision makers and sponsors amongst its customers and prospects. 

 

Robert Blair, Managing Director at RVWL, explained: “Telephone and web based meetings are key to the way we do business. Our target customers are very tight on time, so we if we miss a time slot for a meeting for any reason, we may not get a chance to speak to them again for many weeks. It could cost us business - so we simply cannot afford not to find a time in the day when the right people can all be bought together at the same time.”

 

RVWL has invested in Apple OSX computers for their reliability and low cost of ownership. RVWL staff use a mix of the standard Apple Mail/iCal/Address Book applications or Microsoft’s Entourage for Mac OS X email client, with POP email hosting provided by ISP and managed hosting specialist, CI-Net. In addition a significant number of team members rely on their iPhone for managing meetings and email when out of the office.

 

“iPhones, Entourage and Apple OSX have all the right features for scheduling and managing meetings, but many of the collaboration features, such as checking the availability of colleagues based in the office or remotely to attend client meetings or out of office notifications are not usable because of the limitations of POP or IMAP based email. Furthermore we had many instances of clients saying that the meeting request was not showing up correctly in their calendars. This meant our team were spending a lot of extra time double checking and ensuring that meetings were scheduled correctly, and on more than one occasion meetings failed to occur due to calendaring “issues”, creating significant delays in deal progress and a perception that we were inefficient and un-professional. In the current climate you need to make best use of all your customer facing opportunities, not being able to do so with the required certainty was a big headache,” said Blair.   

 

“We knew that the solution to our problem lay in changing our email based collaboration tools. By not using a solution such as Microsoft Exchange – the de-facto corporate platform or Apple’s OSX Snow Leopard Server solution, we were in effect in a ‘different world’ from our target customers. We felt exposed to being seen as un-professional,” said Blair.

 

With Apple and Microsoft business solutions offering increasingly better integration the best answer was for RVWL to invest in its own Microsoft Exchange or Apple OSX Snow Leopard Server. But as Blair points out the up-front costs of either solution were prohibitive: “The cost of acquiring our own server software and hardware, the associated set-up and ongoing/administration costs only to find out that they did not work as expected would have been just too high.”

 

So Blair’s interest was piqued when he heard that CI-Net was able to offer the option of moving to Exchange Online, a Cloud Computing based Exchange service from Microsoft that promised support for Apple OSX users at a very affordable per user monthly price.

 

Exchange Online, which allows smaller businesses to enjoy the benefits of Microsoft Exchange at a cost effective price, delivers advanced e-mail features, calendaring, contact and task management capabilities. It is offered by CI-Net as a standalone service or packaged with Microsoft Office software as part of the company’s Flex cloud applications service.

 

Before committing to Exchange Online, Blair and his team needed to be sure its Apple OSX environment, Apple iPhones and the various OSX email clients compatible with Microsoft Exchange would have access to all the required features. CI-Net understood that it needed to let RVWL confirm this and agreed to provide a no-cost trial, without any disruption to RVWL’s POP mail service. The trial goals were to prove all aspects of the service, especially scheduling of meetings, mailbox delegation, account management and out-of-office features.

 

“Within five days of running the trial with CI-Net, we knew that Exchange Online was the right solution for us. The trial proved CI-Net’s service and Support team could meet all our requirements and that there were no problems integrating with our IT environment. We decided we didn’t need to carry on with the full 30 day trial and instructed CI-Net that we were happy to migrate to the new service,” said Blair.

 

CI-Net managed all aspects of the service set-up, POP mailbox cessation and re-direction of incoming email, with the switchover being implemented over a weekend. Mail forwarding from employees’ previous email addresses ensured that they would not lose emails during the migration. The contents of their email inboxes were saved as PST files and moved to their new Exchange mailboxes over RVWL’s existing CI-Net provided wide area network.

 

“CI-Net made sure the transition went very smoothly with no problems,” said Blair. “We’re very happy with Exchange Online and its ability to give our business access to the critical features needed for success in today’s competitive and service orientated environment. We get to benefit from all the features and functionality of Microsoft Exchange at an affordable price. 

 

“We estimated that the hardware, software, set up and support costs of running our own Microsoft Exchange solution over a three year period would have added up to between £4600 and £7600. Using Exchange Online through CI-Net we’re able to cut this by about 50 per cent.

 

“We no longer have the hassle and worry we had in the past when scheduling meetings and we’re now confident that the service will enable us to collaborate reliably and successfully with our customers and prospects, regardless of where their staff are based. This brings important time savings for our staff, significant cost avoidance benefits and it allows us to work seamlessly with our prospects and customers using proven collaboration tools that they know and understand and would expect their suppliers to use,” concluded Blair.