When it comes to football, Borussia Mönchengladbach has a tradition of first-class performance. Fans flock to see the five-time German champions. They come to the Borussia Park stadi-um by the tens of thousands to watch the “Foal‘s Eleven”, as they are nick-named, take the field for a home game. The grand opening of the venue in 2004 represents an important milestone in the club‘s history: The current are-na offers space for 20,000 spectators; more space than the Bökelberg stadi-um where the team used to meet its op-ponents. And something has changed in the background as well: Borussia decided to handle its E-mail archiving with EASY for Exchange – now they‘re loyal fans of our solution.

Construction work on the Borussia Park stadium took a full year and a half. On 30 July 2004, FC Bayern Munich and AS Monaco met up on the field for an inaugural tournament against the host

CLIENT

Borussia VfL 1900

Mönchengladbach GmbH

Hennes-Weisweiler-Allee 1

41179 Mönchengladbach

www.borussia.de

INDUSTRY

Professional football

SOLUTION

EASY for Exchange

Ready for the big leaguesTradition and Modernity – Borussia Mönchengladbach Is a Fan of EASY Solutions

team. This marked the start of sporting events – it was also a new era in ano-ther way: The entire administrative de-partment for Borussia Mönchenglad-bach also moved with the team to the new stadium. While the athletes took to the new grass field, their colleagues in the background also got new work sta-tions. As you might expect for a major new construction project like this one, the team‘s entire technical infrastruc-ture also had to be re-installed from scratch – including the server and IT. That’s why Borussia decided to test out their system early on. Ultimately, they decided that an E-mail archiving sys-tem was urgently needed.

“Before moving to the new stadium, we used the standard Outlook tools to archive our E-mails”, IT Manager Frank Fliessgarten remembers. Every-thing generally worked well – but any time an entire IT architecture is revam-ped, the question of long-term future

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performance is always on the table. “During discussions with the service provider who built our server archi-tecture, it became clear that archi-ving in Outlook and PST archives from Outlook would lead to performance problems over time, due to increases in E-mail volumes and ever-larger data bases. It was clear to us that re-search would only get more difficult as time goes by. Last but not least, even in 2004 we anticipated that the issue of legally secure archiving was going to become more and more important”, Fliessgarten says.

New IT Infrastructure EASY: The First RecommendationWith all these concerns, the decision to find a powerful archive to manage this growing flood of E-mails was an easy one. So was the solution. After moving to the new stadium, the service provi-der who handled construction of the IT infrastructure suggested EASY SOFT-WARE, recommending EASY xBASE as the best solution on the market. Borussia got some more information, and soon EASY had won the contract. “We promised ourselves we would have a smooth introduction and a

smooth integration into our employees’ everyday work,” Fliessgarten explains looking back.

In October of 2005, Borussia Mönchen-gladbach purchased EASY xBASE in an initial configuration with 100 mailbo-xes. Just a short time later, the soluti-on was rolled out and reliably doing its duty in the background. “The best com-pliment you can give an archiving solu-tion is that it does its work essentially without you noticing what’s going on. That’s one hundred percent the case with EASY. The solution simply works. It doesn’t create any additional work, it‘s self-explanatory, and we feel good knowing our E-mails are always archi-ved in a legally secure way and easy to find”, Fliessgarten adds. Despite the high data volumes, the system always remains stable and performant. Server data loads were reduced, and all le-gal specifications for data storage and data privacy protection for individual Outlook users were observed. Renewing Choice of EASY in 2015It’s no wonder the team stayed true to EASY in 2015 as well. Eleven years af-ter EASY first took the field, Borussia

Back when the Borussia Mönchengladbach

football club was founded, telephone tech-

nology was still in its infancy, and written

communication was handled via letter or

telegram. It was 1900, long before the in-

ternet, E-mail, and mobile devices. Today

the Bundesliga team – whose colours are

black, white, and green – has more than

70,000 members working to build on the

outstanding success of the 1970s. That was

the decade when the “Foal’s Eleven” won

all five of their championship titles – and

two of their total three German Cups and

two UEFA Cup titles.

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About the company:

“The solution simply works. It doesn’t create any additional work, it‘s self-ex-planatory, and we feel good knowing our E-mails are always archived in a legally secure way and easy to find”.Frank Fleissgarten, IT Manager at Borussia Mönchengladbach.

Mönchengladbach took another look at the market. One reason: In the me-antime, the number of mailboxes had increased to 130. The team needed to purchase additional licenses and train a large number of new colleagues on the system – new growth was on the horizon. Borussia wanted to know whether EASY was still the best choice for them and make sure they were keeping track of the latest develop-ments. During this search, they disco-vered EASY for Exchange.

“We stumbled across the newest ver-sion of EASY for Exchange during our competitive analysis. After we had studied the solution for a short time, we were sure it was the right archi-ving solution for us”, says Christopher Houben, IT specialist for system inte-gration at Borussia Mönchengladbach. He was responsible internally for the upgrade to EASY for Exchange. “We introduced the new version of EASY during a domain migration. The chan-geover was seamless”. An introductory workshop was held in March of 2015. EASY consultants and the internal Borussia IT department implemented the solution in August over two days. Then soft migration of mailboxes could start. “We switched

users over to the new archive step by step between the middle and end of 2015 – around 2.5 terrabytes of archi-ved volume, without any problems”. And without any external help. Houben: “We got instructions from EASY Sup-port on how to set up mailboxes – we were able to handle everything oursel-ves just using this document”. Another major plus: consistent, customer-ori-ented, and timely reaction from EASY Consulting and EASY Support.

User-Friendly Operations Improved Once AgainBorussia Mönchengladbach has archi-ved 200 licensed mailboxes with the current version of EASY for Exchange since the start of 2016. Users can now enjoy even more valuable functions. Above all, they were pleased to find that EASY for Exchange functions are now available directly in Outlook. “Every-thing used forms in the past, which was not as user-friendly. In the current version, you can complete an archive search through an Outlook add-in. This is much simpler for users and saves time”, says Houben.

The EASY search function even makes it possible to search for information in attachments. Simultaneous searches in archived and non-archived E-mails,

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and in multiple archive mailboxes in parallel are also possible. As if that wasn‘t enough, the preview deli-vers both archived E-mails and their attachments. And mobile users can easily synchronize archived E-mails with their laptops.

“The success of this project is based on good implementation, reliable sup-port, and collaboration thoroughly marked by trust and a customer-ori-

ented mindset,” says Christoph Köhne, Head of PartnerPort 2.0 at EASY.

Borussia Mönchengladbach was high-ly impressed by the solution it self, as well. The football club can success-fully handle all its needs, and the upgrade was fast and smooth. IT ma-nager Frank Fliessgarten‘s conclusi-on is nothing but positive: “we would certainly choose EASY for Exchange again.”

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