Paul Smith reduces cost and improves their communications with Exchange 2010

“We’re seeing a huge cost saving in terms of the backup environment. We had 800 GB of data on Data Protection Manager in the Exchange Server 2003 environment. We can remove that cost from day one.”

Lee Bingham, Head of IT, Paul Smith

Paul Smith is a global fashion designer with showrooms in Paris, Milan, New York, and Tokyo. Based in Nottingham and London, England, the company that began 20 years ago as a menswear label now sells a broad range of clothing and luxury goods. The company has 44 retail shops and more than 1,000 employees in worldwide locations.

As Paul Smith has grown as a business, facilitating communication and productivity across the fashion, wholesale, and retail divisions of the business has offered various challenges for its IT team. In 2005, the IT team enlisted a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, risual, to help design, implement, and manage a secure and available network that would ensure access to the applications and services Paul Smith employees need to do their jobs. About half those employees are located in the head offices in Nottingham and London, with the rest dispersed in branch offices in fashion capitals such as New York, Paris, and Milan, and in retail shops around the world.

 

As the business relies heavily on e-mail as part of its daily communication channels between countries, stores and warehouses, Paul Smith required greater flexibility in its management of e-mail, both for mailbox size limits, cost of master database storage and the ability to recover email in the event of an IT issue. Addtionally, Exchange Server 2010′s ability to integrate tightly with existing telephony and voicemail facilities means that the ease of delivering a single inbox for both voicemail and e-mail significantly improves the productivity of every employee.

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