The Need

The Clonmel Chamber of Commerce had identified the cost of their external hosted Exchange Mail solution as a burden, and wanted to redeploy their own mail server.

During the audit phase, Unitec IT Solutions found many issues with the requirements, including desktop technologies not compatible with Microsoft's Exchange Solution, no centralised backups, data being shared on USB memory sticks and anti-virus issues.

The Solution

The traditional small business mail solution is Microsoft Exchange. However all the desktops where running Microsoft Vista/XP home editions, the upgrade and server licensing costs started to outweigh the benefits.

As an independent solutions provider, Unitec IT Solutions researched for other solutions. They settled on Linux Server Technology, offering the following benefits

• Secure logons
• Centralised Storage
• Centralised Email
• Push-Mail to Mobile Phones
• Access to Email from any location via a Web Browser
• Centralised Back-up

The Benefit

Clonmel Chamber of Commerce now have a more secure, locally hosted mail solution, removing the fear of their previous externally hosted provider being offline and their mail becoming unavailable.

With a central server, back-ups of data and mail are scheduled to ensure that no data will be lost.

The central server is also used as a file server, removing the need for USB Memory sticks for file transfers—increasing security as these drives can be easily lost.

To ensure connectivity throughout the day, email is pushed to mobile smartphones and mail can also be accessed from any internet connected computer via a web browser.

Deployment of Nod32 Anti-Virus will ensure safe computing from outside threats.

Conclusion

By thinking “outside of the box”, Unitec IT Solutions have devised a solution with all the functionality required, when past purchases made the Microsoft solution cost prohibitive to implement.

By being truly independent, and utilising their worldwide information technology needs, Unitec IT Solutions have ensured that the Clonmel Chamber will gain cost savings and increased productivity across all of their business functions, without impacting the users by changing the desktop
technology.

This article was created for Unitec IT Solutions and republished with their permisson.