Seamless Development Saves with the Exchange Hybrid

Exchange Hybrid, SharePoint, Technology, Consultants, 50-100

Seamless Development, a professional full-service technology company based in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, specializes in custom programming, internet strategy consulting, and e-commerce solutions.

• Challenge:
  More efficient business communications
• Solution:
  Exchange Hybrid with Hosted SharePoint^®
• Results:
  More time to focus on business growth

Serving Customer Needs and Business Focus

Founded on the premise that state-of-the-art technological tools should be made available and affordable for everyone, Seamless Development’s core business function is research and development. “Our company helps merchants successfully enter into ecommerce and addresses high-level, custom development needs,” according to Mathew Keister, CTO. As a service to their clients, they also offered hosting services. “We had a full infrastructure team running about 20-30 servers for email and web hosting. Last year, we made the decision to get out of infrastructure business because we were spending too much time managing it. It’s not our business focus and never wanted it to be part of the business,” he says.

The company is split between offices in Iowa and New Jersey, making email a vital tool for internal and external communication. “All day long, we’re bouncing emails between the two offices. We work with one of the largest, online clothing retailers. Between our internal email traffic and client traffic, we generate a huge volume of email distributed between system status reporting, emails regarding payments, orders, questions, and shipping.”

In addition to their email dilemma, they were also looking for a SharePoint solution. Their original virtual SharePoint environment was used for development and project management activities. That is, until it ran out space. “We outgrew our disk size in the virtual environment and we didn’t have time to set up another secure SharePoint environment. So, we tried hosting with a different system but it didn’t have all the features we were used to with SharePoint,” he explains. 

Mathew was looking for a business email solution and a way to bring SharePoint back into the organization without investing the time needed to deploy new servers.

Finds a Solution for More Than Just Email Hosting

Before selecting a provider, they had unique issues that needed to be addressed. “We had to be sure we could recreate our configuration in a way that would be unnoticeable to customers. The sales team took the time to discuss and reassure us that Rackspace could meet our unique needs,” says Mathew.

In moving to a hosted environment, they wanted to extend email access to more users, but were concerned about the cost of provisioning Exchange for employees who didn’t need it. “We wanted email for the warehouse, manufacturing, and admin teams, but we weren’t willing to pay for Exchange for that many users,” recalls Mathew.

The Exchange Hybrid gave them a cost-effective way to give email access to more users. With the Exchange Hybrid, customers can add mailboxes of Exchange and Rackspace Email on the same domain based on user roles. By selecting Rackspace Email over Exchange for the majority of their users, businesses can save over $10 per user, per month. “Rackspace Email is very robust and has a great experience and feature set. It’s more than enough for most users.” To complement their email package, they added Rackspace Archiving to address secure, long-term email storage.

Rackspace also delivered the solution to their SharePoint needs. The SharePoint offering allows businesses to organize, store, and share documentation in a secure portal without worrying about software and hardware installations or space limitations. “We were able to port over our previous SharePoint environment and keep growing it without worrying about disk size or security,” says Mathew. 

With Rackspace, they found an all-inclusive business communications provider, thereby eliminating the need for multiple providers to address email and collaboration or deploying multiple in-house systems.

Single-Provider Solution for Multiple Services

“The Apps team is on top of it,” Mathew says of his experience with Rackspace Email & Apps’ Fanatical Support^® team. “Being able to get someone on live chat right when I have an issue is irreplaceable. I deal with a lot of technology companies, and I get nothing like that from other vendors,” he says. Fanatical Support is the core of Rackspace’s hosting service. Giving customers multiple ways to consume support, is just one of the ways we honor our Fanatical Support promise. With the options of live chat, phone, email, or our support documentation library, customers never have to worry about being able to get the help they need, when they need it, how they need it. “I rarely call because of my schedule. I’d much rather chat than call. While I’m getting help, I can do other things, like check email or make phone calls. Even if I need to submit a ticket, I can chat in and have the ticket submitted for me,” states Mathew. He adds, “The Rackspace environment is so redundant, we rarely need to contact you.”

Internally, Mathew can see the benefits of moving their email and SharePoint to Rackspace. “Rackspace has freed up our time. Exchange management issues don’t exist anymore and backups are more accurate and reliable. Instead of troubleshooting, or trying to get a node back up, or dealing with the customer fallout, we can contact Rackspace and have the issue handled,” shares Mathew. “Now, we can focus on building customer relationships and developing new technologies instead of maintaining old ones.”