Burns Express
THE CLIENT
Burns Express Freight (BEF) offers a complete logistics solution across the UK, Ireland and Europe and is based near Glasgow Airport. The company was established almost 25 years ago and provides same day and next day delivery to the UK and Ireland.
BEF operates on a 24/7 basis and requires maximum uptime on their line of business applications and email platform. VectorCloud has been providing support to BEF for over 15 years.
The Challenge
At BEF, email is an important tool not only to contact clients and suppliers but also to integrate with their daily operations.
Email is used by the Transport office to organise and manage the daily freight operations and uptime and security is of critical importance.
Management have a need to access their emails on-the-go, using smartphones.
BEF had access to Email via an on-premise Microsoft Small Business Server, integrated with Microsoft Exchange 2010.
Although it was an economic and reliable solution, it did not offer the level of security and uptime required by the company due to the increased growth and reliance on business operations.
The on-premise solution, lacked redundancy if there was any maintenance required on the Server. It also lacked advanced anti-spam, anti-virus and malware capabilities.
If there were ever outages on-site with regards to broadband or power, email would fail to be delivered thus impacting the high standard of service delivery BEF provide.
The Solution
Burns Express Freight modernised their email platform by signing up to Hosted Exchange provided by VectorCloud. It opted for individual and shared mailboxes provided and maintained by the Microsoft Hosted Exchange platform.
This platform comes with advanced anti-spam, anti-virus, malware and anti-spam heuristics by default and is the benchmark Email platform for todays business critical email platforms.
This filtering system is easy to administer and allows configuration to comply with the company’s computer usage policies. Hosted Exchange by VectorCloud provides enterprise-class service. Functionality increased tenfold over the previous solution. It has very effective history functionality that allows users to organise their messages in folders and to find messages easily via an internal search tool.
However, the greatest advantage of the new Hosted Exchange service for BEF was the possibility of having a unified list of contacts that can be shared by all users within the company. BEF also shares calendars and folders through the familiar Outlook interface, the defacto email client. All this functionality is also available for users working remotely, both from their smartphones and through the portal, accessed via the Internet from anywhere.
Before deciding on the hosted solution from VectorCloud, BEF was considering purchasing their own dedicated email server, to be hosted on its premises. However, this option would be costly, as it would require more than just expensive hardware and software. It would need space to accommodate it, higher levels of maintainenance and significant investment in internal infrastructure: a new air conditioning system, cabling and possibly enhancements to the electrical supply to guarantee stability.
Without improved physical conditions, the hardware would be more prone to faults.
The Positive Outcome
Hosted Exchange is more than just an alternative email solution for BEF – it improves their internal communication by integrating the team. The shared contact list is used as a central database of clients and suppliers for the entire company. Shared calendars help the logistics teams to keep track of important deadlines, holidays,
employee days off and so on.
This tool also facilitates the work of departments such as Accounts, Procurement and Stock Control, that often need to work outside of the office hours.
Using our bespoke migration tools to minimise downtime, Hosted Exchange has proved overall more suitable for BEF needs than its previous solution. With 99.99% uptime and realtime threat protection and security, it is the benchmark Email platform for todays Small, Medium and Large Enterprises alike.
“Email is very important to us, as we don’t work 9 to 5 and some people work remotely. We also use mobiles so we are always connected. VectorCloud managed the project from start to finish ensuring minimal downtime and impact to our business.”
– Carolyn Burns, Burns Express
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