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Lifetime Products manufactures residential basketball equipment, folding tables and chairs, and outdoor sheds and utility tables. The company was founded in 1973 as a garage-based sports equipment business and now has customers all over the world. Approximately 1,700 employees work at the company’s headquarters in Clearfield, Utah, and 600 employees are at facilities in Xiamen, China. Lifetime customers include numerous Fortune 500 companies in more than 50 countries.
The company’s infrastructure includes 1,200 HP workstations running the Windows® XP Professional operating system or using Terminal Services in the Windows Server® 2003 Enterprise Edition operating system. In addition, 300 employees use wireless devices that run Windows Mobile® software.
The combined technologies provide businesscritical messaging and wireless access as well as Information Rights Management capabilities that protect sensitive data. Lifetime deployed Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003 Enterprise Edition in June 2003 and implemented Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 2 (SP2) in October 2005 to incorporate mobile access features as an initial step in moving to a unified messaging environment. The company found that its executives, sales professionals, and other employees who use wireless devices gained an hour a day in productivity. In addition, Lifetime saved money in annual phone costs and in portable computer maintenance.
“We want to use the latest messaging technologies because they are critical to our productivity and bottom line,” explains John Bowden, Chief Information Officer at Lifetime Products. “Our ability to access e-mail from remote locations has saved our company tens of thousands of dollars.”
While pleased with Exchange Server 2003 SP2, the company was eager to move to the next generation of technologies. Lifetime wanted to further improve employee productivity by delivering e-mail, voice-mail, and fax messages to users’ inboxes. The company also sought to reduce costs and simplify IT management by replacing its existing voice-mail system and many of its desktop phones. The voice-mail maintenance contract was U.S.$43,000 per year. And the proprietary phones cost about $600 annually for each user. In addition, because the voicemail and Private Branch Exchange (PBX) systems were separate from the e-mail system, adding new users meant duplicated efforts in setting up new accounts. Another issue for Lifetime was that its China operations were not on an Exchange Server environment and employees there used a POP3 e-mail service. The company did not want to establish a backup infrastructure thousands of miles away that would duplicate management tools and IT personnel.
Solution
In November 2006, Lifetime enrolled in the Microsoft Rapid Deployment Program for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. In early 2007, the company added unified messaging functionality.
Implementing a New Server Infrastructure
The first step was to perform a health check on every system in the Lifetime infrastructure, including 50 HP NetServer and ProLiant server computers. The company used the Microsoft Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer with help from Microsoft Services. The analysis included 12 recommendations for improving the security and performance of the IT environment. Once the health check was completed, engineers configured three new servers, each running Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64 Edition and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Enterprise Edition:
- One server, located in the United States, supports client access and hub transport functionality. “We configured one server to support both of these roles because we were anticipating the load to be quite demanding,” explains Jared Sahleen, Senior Technology Manager at Lifetime Products. The front-end mail servers receive about 1.1 million e-mail messages per month. Lifetime is also using Microsoft Exchange Hosted Filtering in a pilot program as a possible alternative to thirdparty services that scan messages for viruses, spam, and policy compliance.
- One server, also in the United States, stores about 1,000 mailboxes and provides unified messaging services.
- A third server is located in China and provides mailbox, client access, and hub transport functionality.
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