Microsoft Online ServicesCustomer Solution Case Study

Timber Company Enhances Availability, Lowers Cost of Messaging with Hosted Solution

OverviewCountry or Region: United StatesIndustry: Manufacturing—Pulp, paper, and wood industry

Customer ProfileStimson Lumber is a forest products and natural resources management company. The Portland, Oregon–based company operates eight manufacturing plants across the Pacific Northwest of the United States.

Business SituationTo support greater flexibility and lower its total cost of ownership, the company needed to reduce the complexity and improve the resiliency of its multivendor messaging environment.

SolutionStimson Lumber migrated from Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 and separate disaster recovery and antivirus solutions to Microsoft Exchange Online.

Benefits Enhances availability of critical

messaging data Boosts flexibility of mobile access Saves U.S.$12,000 yearly on

maintenance and licensing costs Simplifies upgrade path

“It used to take up to an hour per event to restore email service. With Exchange Online, we benefit from guaranteed performance and availability—without having to maintain the infrastructure.”

Greg Baumgardner, IT Director, Stimson Lumber

To boost IT efficiency and give mobile employees enhanced access to email, Stimson Lumber looked to improve its communications and collaboration infrastructure. The company had relied on Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 and wanted to take advantage of subsequent versions of the technology that include tightened security and advanced mobile capabilities. After evaluating the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite, which includes Microsoft Exchange Online, company leaders decided to move to the hosted messaging solution. With help from Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Vorsite, Stimson Lumber migrated all 215 email accounts to the cloud. It also took advantage of cost savings available through Microsoft Volume Licensing. Now the company benefits from simplified data backup and recovery, improved mobile access to email, and the assurance of 99.9 percent network availability.

SituationFounded in 1850, Stimson Lumber specializes in forest products and timberland management. The company owns more than 450,000 acres of timber and operates eight manufacturing plants spread across Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. Its corporate headquarters are in Portland, Oregon, and the company has approximately 900 employees.

The five-person IT team at Stimson Lumber, led by IT Director Greg Baumgardner, plays a vital role in helping the company boost efficiency. “The IT department is tightly aligned with the business,” says Baumgardner. “We focus on assisting employees across the company in saving time by automating approval workflows and

simplifying data retrieval tasks.”

Beyond process optimization, the IT team supports the messaging infrastructure and tools that enable employees to engage with customers and stay connected to each other. “We receive information about our customers’ purchases and usage of our products via email messages, so it would be hard to get anything done without email,” says Baumgardner.

Stimson Lumber has relied on Microsoft Exchange Server email messaging and collaboration software to meet this critical business need. For the past several years, Baumgardner’s team has maintained an on-premises installation of Exchange Server 2003 at the company’s Portland-area data center, which supports approximately 215 email accounts.

IT staff found that performing backup operations to safeguard against disk failures or other critical data loss events was extremely time consuming. In fact, Baumgardner notes that it took up to six hours to complete this task. “But the biggest difficulty involved setting up the server to handle disaster recovery,” he says. The company depended on SunGard to provide disaster recovery services at a cost of U.S.$800 a month. In the case of a disruptive event, the IT team needed to remotely enable the recovery service. “We had to go through a series of steps to switch to recovery mode through the SunGard solution,” says Baumgardner. “The whole process took about an hour, and sometimes—even after we had restored service—some people would receive their email and others wouldn’t. The procedure was cumbersome and unreliable.”

Stimson Lumber also wanted to gain more flexibility in delivering email to mobile devices. The company used BlackBerry Enterprise Server for Microsoft Exchange to make email and other messaging functionality available to about 50 employees who used BlackBerry smartphones. “We wanted to enhance synchronization between Exchange Server and the mobile clients in general, and we also wanted to give mobile users more choice in which device they used,” says Baumgardner.

SolutionIn June 2010, Stimson Lumber decided to take advantage of a free trial offer to test Microsoft Exchange Online for 30 days. Part of the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite, Exchange Online is a comprehensive hosted messaging solution designed to help organizations increase IT efficiency, lower operating costs, and improve email security.

While still running its on-premises installation of Exchange Server, the company initiated a pilot deployment of the hosted solution to 10 employees. After its month-long evaluation, Stimson Lumber chose to migrate to Exchange Online and retire its on-premises messaging infrastructure. Seizing the opportunity to achieve substantial cost savings through Microsoft Volume Licensing, the company opted to roll the cost of its subscription for Exchange Online into a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement. The company’s two-year agreement includes an upgrade to Microsoft Office 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010.

To gain assistance in moving mailbox data to an online environment and to prepare employees for the transition, Baumgardner and his team reached out to Vorsite, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner based in Seattle, Washington. “The process expertise and knowledge of the technology that Vorsite delivered helped us save two weeks on the migration,” Baumgardner estimates. With help from Vorsite, Stimson Lumber completed the deployment of Exchange Online to all employees, including its mobile workforce, in September 2010. The Vorsite team capitalized on mobile support for Windows Phone, BlackBerry smartphones, and Exchange ActiveSync–enabled devices to quickly connect mobile users to email and other messaging functionality.

Through the Exchange Online Administration Center website, IT staffers are able to add and delete users, configure distribution lists, and provide user support, including handling requests to reset employee passwords. They can also access software and tools through the site, such as the Microsoft Online Services Directory Synchronization tool. With this tool, Stimson Lumber can synchronize its on-premises Active Directory Domain Services database with user account data managed through the Exchange Online service.

Baumgardner and his team no longer need to perform backup operations to ensure redundancy for their messaging environment. Instead, mailbox data is automatically and continuously replicated to Microsoft data centers in distributed geographic locations.

By using Microsoft Forefront Online Protection for Exchange, which is included with Exchange Online, Stimson Lumber gains customizable policy-based filtering and multilayered protection against malicious software and other threats. This meant that the company could terminate its use of a separate email filtering and virus-scanning solution from M86 Security. “Having all of these components together in a single solution means less complexity in our environment and fewer moving parts for our team to manage,” says Baumgardner.

BenefitsBy moving to a hosted messaging solution, the Stimson Lumber IT team is helping ensure high availability, flexible mobile access, and rapid disaster recovery. In addition, the IT team no longer needs to maintain and support on-site infrastructure together with third-party data replication and security solutions. And through the Microsoft Enterprise Agreement, Stimson Lumber can maximize the

“Our Enterprise Agreement gives us easy access to the most advanced Microsoft technologies to support the changing needs of our business.”

Greg Baumgardner, IT Director,Stimson Lumber

value of its continued investment in innovative technologies to support business growth.

Enhances Availability of Critical Messaging DataStimson Lumber gains the confidence and convenience that come from working with a single, trusted provider to protect, archive, and recover its messaging data. Through its use of Exchange Online, the company benefits from 99.9 percent network uptime, the availability of phone-based support 24 hours a day, and recovery procedures that are designed around the way the technology works. Today, IT staff can support the company’s messaging environment with less effort. “It used to take up to an hour per event to restore email service,” says Baumgardner. “With Exchange Online, we benefit from guaranteed performance and availability—without having to maintain the infrastructure.”

Boosts Flexibility of Mobile Access Because Exchange Online supports access to email, calendars, contacts, and other messaging data from the latest mobile devices, Stimson Lumber can extend greater flexibility to employees. “Before, we were limited to synchronizing data with the BlackBerry device and that was it,” says Baumgardner. “Now, we’re empowered to give our employees more choices. If workers want to use a Windows Phone, iPhone, or Android device to get their email, we can quickly set them up through the Administration Center site and they’re ready to go.” Saves $12,000 Yearly on Maintenance and Licensing CostsBecause Exchange Online combines comprehensive messaging functionality, email security, and data backup and disaster recovery in an easy-to-manage hosted environment, Stimson Lumber reaps savings. The company can retire its on-premises messaging infrastructure while avoiding monthly costs associated with third-party software and service agreements. The company expects to save $1,000 a month by consolidating disaster recovery and email protection in a single solution. And, over the next two years, Stimson Lumber will substantially lower its total cost of ownership through its Microsoft Enterprise Agreement.

Gains Easy Path to the Latest TechnologiesBy adopting cloud computing and moving its messaging environment to Exchange Online, Stimson Lumber was able to accelerate its upgrade to the technology that supports Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. And, through its Enterprise Agreement, the company now has even greater flexibility to upgrade to subsequent versions of the Exchange Server technology when they become available.

Furthermore, Stimson Lumber capitalized on Microsoft Volume Licensing savings to gain access to additional Microsoft solutions, including Microsoft Office 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. The company plans to use these tools to help boost productivity, meet new reporting regulations, provide online training, and sharpen its business intelligence capabilities. “Our Enterprise Agreement gives us easy access to the most advanced Microsoft technologies to support the changing needs of our business,” says Baumgardner.

Microsoft Online ServicesMicrosoft Online Services are business-class communication and collaboration solutions delivered as a subscription service and hosted by Microsoft. With these offerings, customers can cost-effectively access the most up-to-date technologies and immediately benefit from streamlined communications, simplified management, and business-class reliability and security features. For IT staffers, Microsoft Online Services are backed by strong service level agreements and help reduce the burden of performing routine IT management, freeing up time to focus on core business initiatives.

For more information, visit: www.microsoft.com/online For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:www.microsoft.com

For more information about Vorsite products and services, call (206) 781-1797 or visit the website at: www.vorsite.com

For more information about Stimson Lumber products and services, call (800) 445-9758 or visit the website at: www.stimsonlumber.com

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published April 2011

Software and Services Microsoft Online Services

- Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite

- Microsoft Exchange Online- Microsoft Forefront Online

Protection for Exchange Technologies

- Active Directory Domain Services Solutions

- Software-plus-services

Services- Microsoft Enterprise Agreement

Partner Vorsite

“Now, we’re empowered to give our employees more choices. If workers want to use a Windows Phone, iPhone, or Android device to get their email, we can quickly set them up through the Administration Center site and they’re ready to go.”

Greg Baumgardner, IT DirectorStimson Lumber