Presbyterian Homes Cuts Cost of New Email Solution By 90-Percent With IMail Server from Ipswitch
Company: Presbyterian Homes
Industry: Healthcare
Business Challenge: Find and deploy an easy-to-use, low-cost email solution.
Issues: Limited budget and IT staff time of a typical non-profit organization;
inexperienced corporate email users.
Outcome: Presbyterian Homes cut costs by over 90-percent by choosing IMail Server
from Ipswitch compared to Microsoft Exchange. Email administrators had to allocate only 15-minutes per user for set-up time, and users quickly adapted to using the new software.
When Presbyterian Homes decided to rollout new email services for its 75 end-users, the organization faced a clear challenge: find a low-cost email solution that users and administrators could adapt to quickly.
“Many users did not have experience with corporate email,” said Carl Waterhouse, Chief Information Officer for Presbyterian Homes. “We needed an intuitive solution they could learn easily. We also wanted to find an email solution easy to administer so we would not have to allocate an exorbitant amount of staff time.”
Presbyterian Homes is based in Pennsylvania and has served the elderly in communities throughout northwest Pennsylvania for over half a century. A staff of over 400 caregivers provides residential care to more than 400 people in a network of six homes across the region. Residents receive professionally supervised nursing care as well as related medical and health services 24-hours a day.
The organization had been running Windows 98 on their desktops while using the Windows Postoffice feature for email. When it decided to migrate to Windows 2000, Presbyterian Homes had to choose another email solution since Windows 2000 did not support Microsoft PostOffice.
“We could have gone with Microsoft Exchange at that point,” said Waterhouse. “But the cost was prohibitive -- especially for a non-profit organization like ours.” Instead Waterhouse turned to IMail Server from Ipswich. A reliable, affordable, and easy-to-use messaging solution, IMail Server provides email services for over 30 million users worldwide. The software contains key email features and safeguards without the complexity and expense of other groupware that challenges even the most experienced administrators.
“I worked with IMail Server at a previous company, so I already knew just how easy it was to administer and how easy it was for users to learn,” Waterhouse said.
Waterhouse also knew IMail Server would save Presbyterian Homes a considerable amount of money. “IMail Server costs about 10-percent of the up front cost of Microsoft Exchange,” Waterhouse said. “On an on-going basis, the hidden costs are much less too in terms of the amount of administration time and learning by end users.”
Presbyterian now has over 75 users at six locations using IMail Server, which Waterhouse installed on a Compaq ProLiant server running Microsoft Windows 2000 and TCP/IP. “IMail Server has run smoothly for about a year,” Waterhouse said. “The organization communicates much faster and more accurately with each other as well as external people, and email messages do not have to funnel through one departmental person to others in the department as it did with PostOffice. We’ve also cut down considerably on the amount of communication over the fax machine.”
When users travel, Waterhouse turns on the IMail Server Web messaging feature in cases where the users don't want to carry their laptop but need to check e-mail. “This lets our remote users easily read and send e-mail from any Web connection at an airport, hotel or other company,” Waterhouse said. “The users benefit further from being able to access familiar desktop e-mail features like spell-check and their address book.”
IMail Server has also given Presbyterian Homes a seamless email tool that it can use across all of its platforms, including Windows 98, 2000 and XP. “IMail Sever integrates easily with Microsoft Outlook or Express on all these platforms,” Waterhouse said. “The software also has administrator tools that make it easy to maintain. For example, we can update and populate IMail users via the NT client.”
To fully understand all the features and benefits of IMail Server, Waterhouse attended a two-day training course in Orlando. Designed to deliver an overall practical understanding of IMail's role within a company’s email demands, the course explains everything about IMail Server from installation to ongoing administration to maintenance. The course also highlights IMail's functionality and provides an understanding of email server fundamentals. Attendees learn all the tricks to help them act more proactively and succeed in their daily email administration responsibilities.
“I found the course to be very helpful, especially its coverage of the anti-spam and virus-protection features as well as the user-support groups that we can access,” Waterhouse said. “We can easily block sources that continually send spam to our staff so they don’t have to waste time deleting junk mail. If a virus sneaks through, we’ll know immediately.”
Waterhouse gives high marks for the overall experience with IMail Server. “Because of how simple IMail Server is to use, we only had to spend about 15-minutes per user when setting up new accounts, and the users picked up right away how to send, receive and store email,” Waterhouse said. “But the strongest evidence supporting IMail Server is that we’ve never had to call for technical support.”
