“We concluded that upgrading to Exchange Server 2010, rather than implementing a third-party archiving system, would give us the best user experience, along with more streamlined IT management.” Neil Bingham, IT Manager, Frontier Silicon Frontier Silicon, a fabless semiconductor company, needed a better way to archive its scattered email. The company chose to adopt Microsoft Exchange Server 2010—rather than a third- party archiving product—because of its advanced archiving capabilities and familiarity among users. Frontier Silicon now has an easy-to-use messaging solution that offers a unified view of current and historical email and contributes to a manageable IT environment. Business Needs Established in 2001 as a privately funded semiconductor company, Frontier Silicon supplies most major consumer electronics makers with turnkey semiconductor, module, and software solutions. The company has offices and manufacturing facilities in Europe and Asia, with its engineering talent spread across the globe. “Email is vital to our cross-team collaboration,” says Neil Bingham, IT Manager at Frontier Silicon. “As the company has grown, so has the need for our engineers and manufacturing personnel to be able to communicate with their dispersed colleagues.” In 2007, Frontier Silicon adopted Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 to handle that communication. The company found that its messaging infrastructure served it well but that it needed a better way to manage all its email. “Employees constantly refer back to old material, whether sales quotes or engineering decisions,” says Bingham. “We were continually archiving email to PST [personal storage table] files, which meant that our archives were located on desktop computers scattered among all our locations.” In June 2010, the Frontier Silicon IT department set out to find a new solution for archiving. “We generate a staggering amount of email—as much as 2 gigabytes per executive per quarter—and having easy access to it would help support our effort to decrease time-to-market for our products,” says Bingham. Solution Frontier Silicon considered systems from CommVault and Symantec, as well as Microsoft Exchange Server 2010. Although the company used backup software from CommVault, it determined that employees would find Exchange Server 2010 easier to use than the CommVault alternative. As for Symantec Enterprise Vault content archiving software, adopting it would have been a departure from the company’s existing infrastructure. “Introducing Symantec software would have resulted in more than [U.S.]$8,000 (£5,000) in training costs alone for IT staff and end users as well, because it did not behave the same way from remote locations as it did on the local area network,” explains Bingham. “We also would have needed to include add-ins and toolbars to employees’ desktop software for either non-Microsoft alternative.” Frontier Silicon found flexible archiving functionality in Exchange Server 2010 that it could install, use, and manage without burdening IT staff or end users. This functionality included the Outlook Anywhere feature, which mobile workers use to easily access archives without a Customer: Frontier Silicon Website: www.frontier-silicon.com Customer Size: 120 employees Country or Region: United Kingdom Industry: Professional services— Engineering Partner: POSTcti Partner Website: www.postcti.com Customer Profile Based in London, United Kingdom, Frontier Silicon supplies semiconductor, module, and software solutions for digital radio and connected audio systems around the world. Software and Services Microsoft Server Product Portfolio − Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Microsoft Office − Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 − Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2 − Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 − Microsoft Outlook 2010 Technologies − Outlook Anywhere − Outlook Web App For more information about other Microsoft customer successes, please visit: www.microsoft.com/casestudies Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Customer Solution Case Study Electronics Supplier Enhances Efficiency, User Experience with Improved Archiving Solution