Most businesses today see e-mail as a business critical application. At Dunelm, a leading UK furnishing retailer, the need to build a stable, high performing platform, that can dovetail into business process as well as the exponential increase in e-mail traffic was critical.

Turning to their strategic IT service partner risual and maximising their investment in Microsoft technology, the migration path to Exchange Server 2007 was clear. From the outset, Exchange Server 2007 provided resilient e-mail, larger and more manageable mailboxes and a Unified Messaging platform to consolidate both e-mail and voicemail messages in a single inbox.

With a heavier reliance on e-mail, came the need to ensure its reliability and uptime. As part of the design for Exchange Server 2007, risual and Dunelm’s IT team built a Disaster Recovery solution by looking at e-mail as a service rather than an application. By taking reviewing the Directory Service, network, existing e-mail use and need and the methods of access, the solutions could be designed from the ground up to ensure the service continuity is transparent whilst reducing the time and effort the in-house IT team needs to dedicate to ensuring e-mail is delivered in the manner to which the business demands.