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Case Study: E-Mail as a Managed Service
Special to Law.com
November 04, 2009
Image: Laurent Hamels, Getty Images
Law firms have a reputation for being document-intensive, and Miami-based Stearns Weaver Miller Weissler Alhadeff & Sitterson is no exception. Over the last several years, this full-service firm has worked diligently at becoming a paperless operation, and more than 95 percent of everything it does now is computer-based, says Eugene Cabreja, IT director at Stearns Weaver.
Until recently, however, Stearns Weaver's e-mail system was hobbling in their digital transition. The firm was using an outdated Novell GroupWise installation that was buckling under the massive amount of e-mail going back and forth between attorneys, staff and clients. To make matters worse, it didn't integrate well with the firm's BlackBerry Enterprise Server. Given that most of the firm's 120 lawyers use BlackBerry devices as a primary means of communication, an outage on that end could mean the difference between getting a 200-page M&A agreement to the client with time to spare and missing the deadline altogether.
The firm decided to migrate from GroupWise to Microsoft Exchange 2007, but Cabreja had several concerns about both the migration and the subsequent management of the new Exchange site. First off, neither Cabreja nor his staff was well-versed in Exchange, and even if any of them were, the task of administering Exchange and BES in a proactive fashion would have been an onerous one at best.
Then a fellow IT professional told Cabreja about Seattle-based Azaleos and their Managed Exchange Services. Not only could Azaleos map out the migration from GroupWise to Exchange, it also offered the 24/7 proactive monitoring and management Cabreja wanted and integrated managed services for BES. "Azaleos had exactly what I needed," Cabreja says.
THE ABILITY TO BREATHE
In the 10 years since Cabreja joined Stearns Weaver, the firm has grown from three offices (serving a staff of 200) with six servers to four offices (serving a staff of 300-plus) and 50 servers. "The increased complexity of having to manage all these servers and the applications that are on them along with the archiving, accounting, paperless litigation and other data not related to e-mail means we cannot spend all day looking up why somebody didn't get an e-mail," he says.
Cabreja felt comfortable putting the firm's e-mail infrastructure in Azaleos' hands for several reasons. Most importantly, Azaleos had demonstrated expertise in the workings of Microsoft Exchange. Lee Dumas, Azaleos director of architecture, was a core member of Microsoft's Exchange development team, and several others on Azaleos' management team either are Microsoft alumni or have overseen Exchange implementations at Fortune 500 companies.
Moreover, Azaleos' managed Exchange services uses patented technologies that keep abreast of more than 2,800 Exchange data points, all of which are monitored by the company's team of Exchange specialists working in its network operations centers located in Seattle and Charlotte, N.C. Should anything look amiss, these professionals not only can fix the problem on their end, they can alert Cabreja's team before any outages or other problems occur.
"The whole combination that Azaleos offers, including the 24-hour monitoring, lets you breathe finally," says Cabreja. "Azaleos is making sure mailboxes are running and that e-mail is going in and out of the firm, [including] those coming and going from my BlackBerry users," Cabreja says. "And trust me, when their BlackBerries stopped working, they used to let me know!"
KEEPING DATA IN-HOUSE
Azaleos also offered something that no other vendor seemed to offer: the ability for Stearns Weaver to keep its servers on-premise rather than off-site. Cabreja says he wanted this type of setup because Stearns Weaver has to manage countless e-mails, most with very large attachments. The ability to route data using in-house gigabit Ethernet lines versus the Internet or T1 lines required by a fully hosted e-mail management service meant that Stearns Weaver employees could access their e-mails and other documents without the threat of data bottlenecks.
Cabreja also noted that Stearns Weaver management preferred that the firm's servers remain in-house so that it maintains control of the information. Because Stearns Weaver has to remain vigilant about issues pertaining to federal compliance regulations and e-discovery, "the best-case scenario is that we still have our servers on the premises," says Cabreja.
BETTER THAN HAVING A DEDICATED EXCHANGE EXPERT
Once Stearns Weaver decided to use Azaleos' services, Azaleos helped the firm design a new Exchange system from the ground up. "We didn't have anything, not even Windows Directory Services running," Cabreja says.
Azaleos provided Stearns Weaver with hardware recommendations, helping the firm construct a centralized system that could easily manage all the e-mail streaming through the Exchange and BlackBerry servers. Moreover, Azaleos set up the new system to integrate seamlessly with, among other things, the firm's new Active Directory, archiving system and off-site, standby disaster recovery server. The high-availability configuration that Azaleos used to design the new system used a VMware-based virtual infrastructure that enabled Stearns Weaver to run its combined Exchange and BlackBerry server architecture on just two physical servers rather than four.
Cabreja says that because Stearns Weaver had to buy new hardware to carry out the migration to Exchange 2007, the firm had the luxury of migrating to a new system without interfering with day-to-day operations. "We ran our conversions in-house on multiple computers for days, converting millions of e-mails to Exchange. We spent a month moving data," he recalls.
The Azaleos consultant assigned to handle the Stearns Weaver migration already had managed GroupWise to Exchange migrations on behalf of several other customers. According to Cabreja, Azaleos monitored the entire process, and for the final week before Stearns Weaver finally pulled the plug on GroupWise, Azaleos employees went to the law firm, supervising and monitoring the implementation. "Azaleos did this not just because of the implementation, but because it's their job to monitor the system," Cabreja says. "Having Azaleos is better than hiring an Exchange expert because they have people working for you 24 hours, seven days a week, and all at a fixed fee."
Robyn Weisman is a freelance writer based in California.
