Old River Cabinets Hosted Email Case Study

Company profile

Old River Cabinets is a leading provider of high-quality custom-built cabinetry with five locations throughout Virginia and North Carolina.

Business situation

Old River Cabinets experienced a period of rapid growth in customers, employees and locations. As a result, they had difficulty connecting all locations and providing the 75+ employees with basic services such as, email, calendar sharing, contact sharing, shared folders and general inter-office communications.

Technical situation

Old River Cabinets installed several unrelated products to solve their communication issues over the years. As the staff struggled to work with these disparate and unconnected systems, communication problems began to erupt threatening employee productivity and customer satisfaction.
Major technical problems experienced included:

• The proprietary mail server was unreliable and would consistently drop emails and connections.
• The shared calendar and contacts application was constantly out of sync providing an inconsistent view of employee and client data.
• The slow connection speed at the factory prevented remote users from accessing files and folders on the network.
• Support costs were exorbitant with an average of 4-5 support calls per week just for the mail server and calendar system.

Requirements

To avoid growing employee dissatisfaction and the potential for disruption in services to their customers, Old River Cabinets needed a unified system to provide all of the necessary communication features in a stable platform that could expand as they grew.

Solution

Strategic Technology Systems provided the following solutions:

• A unified communication platform to handle all email, calendar, contacts, tasks, and shared folders. 
• Re-located the internet connection at the factory to an area with a faster and more stable internet connection.
• A hosted email and collaboration server from Kerio Connect. Kerio Connect provides unified email, calendar, contacts and shared folders for all users. 

Benefits

After implementation of the new email and collaboration suite, Old River Cabinets was able to realize the following benefits:

• All employees had access to their email, contacts and calendars, regardless of location or device.
• Connection speed and stability of the Strategic Technologies hosted email platform was increased.
• Email environment stability increased to 99.99% uptime with Strategic Technologies hosted email platform and 24x7 monitoring.
• Reduced software-licensing expenditures of over $2000 per year.
• Eliminated weekly support requests for their email platform, saving over $1500 per month.

Products and services used in this solution

In order to provide Old River Cabinets with the benefits listed above the following products/services were used:

• Kerio Connect Mail Server
• Kerio Control Firewall
• Microsoft Outlook 2010
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional
• Microsoft Windows 7 Professional