About Tangible Group
In 2008, Tangible Group emerged as the new brand name under which the Cello Group categorised its response communications arm. The company's employees work across three sites in Edinburgh and London. Advertising and creative specialists Leith Agency, Stripe PR and Blonde digital marketing companies are just a sample of the agencies operating under the expanding banner of Tangible Group.
Challenge
With a small IT department servicing a large number of users, Tangible Group wanted a standardised, centrally controlled e-mail infrastructure that would be easy to manage—but with companies in the group using Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Notes and Novell GroupWise®, administration was complex.
"Novell GroupWise has been our preferred e-mail solution for several years, but we still had a number of users on other platforms," said David Watson, IT Manager at Tangible Group. "By standardising on a new version of Novell GroupWise in our London and Edinburgh locations, we hoped to create a single point of control that would reduce the need to travel between sites for maintenance."
Working in a creative industry, around 35 percent of Tangible Group employees were Mac users and this percentage was expected to rise. There was also a small community of Linux users. The ability to support Mac, Linux and Windows clients was a key requirement for the new standardised e-mail environment.
Novell Solution
Tangible Group decided to upgrade to the latest version of Novell GroupWise—taking advantage of significant improvements to the Mac and Linux clients, as well as more advanced calendaring features. As users of Novell GroupWise for almost eight years, Tangible Group was confident when its long-time IT partner NDS8, a Novell Platinum PartnerSM, recommended the upgrade.
"NDS8 was the company that helped us implement Novell GroupWise in the first place, so we trusted them when they said the latest version of the software was the best option for us," said Watson. "For us, what sets Novell solutions apart is their reliability and resilience. This is exactly what we need when we are co-ordinating so many different agencies that need uninterrupted access to e-mail and collaboration services."
The IT department at Tangible Group was also impressed by the effortless installation process.
"The upgrade to the new version of Novell GroupWise was simple and undemanding - we migrated four servers in about an hour with mere seconds of downtime," said Watson. "This helped us preserve our status as a 'behind the scenes' team, giving our users the best service with minimal disruption."
With the new e-mail servers in production, NDS8 helped the in-house IT team migrate the majority of the remaining Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Notes users onto the Novell GroupWise system. Almost all companies in Tangible Group now use the same e-mail platform, and the final few users are expected to migrate in the near future.
Tangible Group has also introduced several new functionalities to improve employees' productivity. For example, the multiple calendaring capabilities make the challenge of co-ordinating activities across different group companies much easier. As a quarter of Tangible Group staff use BlackBerry handhelds, the IT department also integrated Novell GroupWise with the company's BlackBerry Enterprise Server, enabling employees to access their Novell GroupWise accounts on the go.
Results
Collaboration is central to Tangible Group's success, and Novell GroupWise has enabled enormous improvements in this area.
"The external calendar feature has made our personal assistants' lives much easier, as they can now organise complicated schedules more easily," said Watson. "Equally, the ability to customise personal dashboards means employees can tailor the user interface to suit their preferences and maximise productivity."
The ability to manage the Novell GroupWise servers remotely means that if problems occur, the Tangible Group IT department can respond swiftly and efficiently without the inconvenience and cost of travelling to another site.
"Even though Tangible Group is expanding, we still need only a relatively small IT team, as we know we can rely on our e-mail system to provide a high level of performance with little upkeep," said Watson. "The low administration requirements of Novell GroupWise mean that we can allocate more IT resources to other projects, leading to a more efficient and streamlined operation."
Novell GroupWise also continues to be the right choice for Tangible Group in terms of security and resilience. The Novell solution was unaffected by a recent virus outbreak which caused disruption to other systems and required the IT team to work round-the-clock to resolve issues.
"We were impressed to find Novell GroupWise running with no problems and Web access still available," said Watson. "This proved to us that we had made the right choice. In our opinion, the Novell solution is unbeatable when it comes to security and reliability."