From its founding in 1921, the customer has grown into a
major American property and casualty insurance company that prides itself on
providing efficient, professional, and personalized service. With 2000+ employees and 3400 independent
agencies scattered across 33 states, efficiency in internal communication
requires the presence awareness and real-time collaboration found only in an
enterprise-class IM solution.
Then: Internal
Development
The customer’s quest to improve communication lead them to
deploy Microsoft Live Communications Server in 2005. But when administrators discovered they had
no way to view previous conversations natively in LCS—and did not want to
utilize their email system with Outlook’s conversation history folder—an
internal development team was assembled to build an archive viewer.
When the customer subsequently upgraded to Microsoft Office Communications
Server, the development team was reassembled to modify the original code to
support OCS and to add functionality such as a web-based interface through
which end users could access their archived chats. 180 man hours later, four insurmountable
challenges put an end to the development project:
- The encoding inside the LCSlog database for OCS was very
different;
- Query results could not be manipulated to display correctly;
- Multi-party chats could not be displayed successfully; and
- Security and confidentiality could be compromised simply by
manipulating a chat’s URL string.
Thus began the customer’s search for a third-party OCS
archive viewer.
Instant Archive Viewer for Microsoft OCS
The customer’s search lead them to the enterprise IM experts
at Instant Technologies.Instant Archive
Viewer provides role-based archive search and discovery for Microsoft OCS.
- Internal usage policies are easily enforced;
- Compliance audits and legal discovery requests are
completely fulfilled; and
- The information that would otherwise be locked in your OCS
archives instead becomes a usable (and valuable) business asset.
Now: External
Procurement
“Microsoft OCS is a strategically vital communications
medium,” says the customer’s Lead PC/LAN Consultant. “We absolutely require the ability to access
our archived chats, but after encountering technical complexities that consumed
a lot more time and resources than we’d expected, we decided it was time to
seek a third-party solution.”
The customer surveyed the market and found that Instant
Archive Viewer from Instant Technologies offered the most compelling features
at the best price.
“The .Net interface was a large selling point for us,”
continues the Lead PC/LAN Consultant. “The amount of time required to develop and support such an interface
would far outweigh the price of the product. And when you factor in the
pre-built queries and support structure behind Instant Technologies, the
decision to buy was easy.”
“We work very closely with our customers to define and build
the features they need to optimize their IM infrastructures,” says Peyton McManus, President of Instant
Technologies. “This customer had some
rather specific requirements stemming from their development efforts that we
were able to incorporate for the benefit of all our customers.”
“In working with Instant Technologies, we obtained the best
of both worlds,” concludes the Lead PC/LAN Consultant. “We have a commercially-proven product that
was tweaked to our requirements by an experienced team that specializes in
enterprise IM solutions. And while a few
kinks must still be worked out, we’ve found Instant’s support and development
staff to be accommodating to our many requests and needs.” |