Baker Tilly

Accounting Services Firm Upgrades Messaging to Improve Availability, Reduce Costs

Baker Tilly, an independent firm of chartered accountants and business advisers, has more than 2,200 employees in 25 locations across the United Kingdom. Effective communication and collaboration are critical to these workers so that they can deliver timely, quality advice to help their clients. Baker Tilly was looking to deploy a unified communications solution that would make it easier for employees in different parts of the organization to work together. In addition, Baker Tilly wanted to improve the disaster recovery and e-discovery capabilities of its messaging environment. To achieve these goals, the company deployed a pilot of Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010. After deploying the pilot, the firm found that by upgrading, it could improve its disaster-recovery environment, lower storage costs, reduce administration effort, and improve employees’ user experience.

 

Situation

Baker Tilly is an independent firm of chartered accountants and business advisers who assist clients with their business challenges. With more than 2,200 employees, Baker Tilly is the seventh largest accountancy and business advisory firm in the United Kingdom. The firm’s network of 29 offices in 25 locations across the United Kingdom enables its customers to rely on a local firm with national strength.

The accountants and business advisors at Baker Tilly work as a cohesive team with their clients and with each other. Effective communication and collaboration are critical to their commitment to deliver timely, quality advice to help their clients achieve their goals. Notes David Hilland, Deputy Director of IT at Baker Tilly, “Essentially, our stock and trade is access to people—working with our clients and our clients’ customers, oftentimes at their places of business. E-mail is vital to our daily operations, especially to the good proportion of our people who work
offsite.”

The firm’s current messaging environment includes 2,400 mailboxes in Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003, which runs in a single data center. For high availability, Baker Tilly runs a single copy cluster, with one active node and one passive node. It has one disaster recovery (DR) site in London, where it would also like to be able to replicate data. Andrew Tyson, Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Baker Tilly, explains, “We would like to have real-time replication and fast failover without data loss to our DR site in London.”

For storage of Exchange Server 2003 data, Baker Tilly uses a storage area network (SAN) with 146-gigabyte fiber-channel disks. Since the cost of storage is high, the firm has enforced mailbox quotas of 350 megabytes (MB) for employees. Because of the 350-MB limit, some employees use Outlook Data Files (PSTs) to save additional e-mail messages; these files may be kept on a user’s personal hard disk drive and backed up onto the network file servers. However, backing up PST files on the network takes up a lot of space, puts a strain on the servers, and duplicates data.

Another area where Baker Tilly sees room for improvement is administration time, which can be drained completing tasks such as managing distribution lists and performing e-discovery searches. Tyson explains, “We currently perform mailbox searches. Essentially, our team has to do the searches on behalf of other teams.”

On the front end, most Baker Tilly employees access their e-mail, contacts, and calendar using the Microsoft Office Outlook® 2007 messaging and collaboration client. Tyson says, “Prior to our Windows® 7 implementation, we moved our enterprise from Outlook 2003 to Outlook 2007.”

Because communication and collaboration tools are critical to ensuring employees’ productivity, Baker Tilly also would like to integrate its messaging solution with its other communications and collaboration investments: Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 and Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007. “We have a number of ‘virtual’ parts of Baker Tilly spread over a number of locations. We want to broaden people’s ability to work together. Given our current infrastructure, employees sometimes work in discrete silos. They wait until their portion of the work is completed to share information through Exchange,” says Hilland. “We want to remove those silos.”

Solution

In August 2009, Baker Tilly deployed a pilot of Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 as part of the Exchange Server 2010 Rapid Deployment Program. Baker Tilly quickly determined that Exchange Server 2010 can help it reach many of the goals it had outlined for a new messaging solution. In particular, it will be able to provide a simpler, more robust disaster recovery solution. It will also be able to simplify some of its administration tasks, and provide employees with a better collaboration environment.

It’s a real benefit to have an enterprise version of disaster recovery and failover built into the Microsoft solution. David Hilland Deputy Director of IT, Baker Tilly

Baker Tilly will deploy Exchange Server 2010 in its main data center, and implement Database Availability Groups to provide an improved high-availability and disaster-recovery solution. Database Availability Groups combine on-site and off-site data replication to help protect the messaging environment from downtime. Baker Tilly can define mailbox servers as part of a Database Availability Group and use continuous replication to provide automatic recovery from a variety of failures at the disk, server, or data center level. It will maintain three database copies, two at the primary data center for local failover, and one at the DR site for remote failover.

Exchange Server 2010 offers a 90 percent reduction in disk input/output (I/O) over Exchange Server 2003, which lowers the bar for minimum disk performance required to run Exchange Server. Baker Tilly will maintain its current SAN solution, but it will switch from redundant array of independent disks (RAID) 10 fiber-channel disks to RAID 5 with Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) disks.

Simplified Administration

With Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), Baker Tilly can delegate tasks such as mailbox creation, distribution list management, and e-discovery. For instance, using RBAC, administrators can give teams such as security or the help desk the rights to perform administrative tasks that align closely with their roles and areas of responsibility. Administrators create management roles and then assign a scope to each role, further defining what objects—servers, organizational units, filters, and so on—workers can manage. Tyson explains, “With Exchange Server 2003, we would have to give people full administration rights to create mailboxes and have more control. With RBAC, we can extend only the rights that are necessary for what the person needs to accomplish.”

Baker Tilly plans to use the self-service features of Exchange Control Panel in Exchange Server 2010 to help offset even more administration tasks. With the control panel, employees can manage their own distribution groups. They can create new groups for their projects, or they can opt out of groups to help avoid unnecessary messages cluttering their inboxes. Group owners can also add co-owners and new members, without relying on help-desk support to add and remove people from the groups. Owners can also appoint group moderators to regulate what messages are sent to the group.

For e-discovery tasks, Baker Tilly will use the Exchange Control Panel and Legal Hold capabilities. Using the Exchange Control Panel, administrators or other users with the correct permissions can perform multi-mailbox searches for items such as messages, attachments, contacts, or calendar entries. With Legal Hold, administrators or legal teams preserve a copy of edited or deleted mailbox items, either on an individual basis or for an entire organization. “With RBAC and the compliance features in Exchange Server 2010, we have the ability to provide employees with the correct permissions to search mailboxes and gather information,” says Tyson. “We will also be able to replace the third-party software that we currently license and support with these built-in features.”

Integrated Productivity Tools

Baker Tilly hopes to enhance collaboration with better interoperability among Exchange Server 2010, Office SharePoint Server 2007, and Office Communications Server 2007. Presence features across the Microsoft solution, including within Outlook 2010—which Baker Tilly plans to deploy as its primary e-mail client as soon as it is released—and Outlook Web App, let employees know when colleagues are available to collaborate. The consultants can then initiate an instant messaging conversation or send an e-mail depending on their needs.

By upgrading to Outlook 2010, the firm can take full advantage of many of the new features in Exchange Server 2010. Employees will be better equipped to prioritize and manage their communications with new capabilities, such as MailTips, which lets employees know, before they click the Send button, whether a message recipient is out of the office or a message is being sent to a large distribution list. Employees can organize and view their e-mail messages by conversation topic using Conversation View, and delete all redundant e-mail messages in a thread with the Clean Up Conversation feature. Using Quick Steps, workers can automate frequent workflows, such as filing messages, forwarding messages, or replying to a message and then deleting it.

Migration Plan

Baker Tilly plans to deploy Exchange Server 2010 to all employees soon after the product is released in November 2009. Tyson explains, “As a result of our early success with Exchange Server 2010, we will migrate most of the company over a few weeks at the beginning of 2010. A quick migration will minimize the disruption to users.”

Without the Windows PowerShell integration into Exchange Management Shell, we wouldn’t have gotten half as far as we are at the moment. Andrew Tyson Senior Infrastructure Engineer, Baker Tilly

The firm plans to automate many of its routine administrative functions during the migration using Exchange Management Shell, a command-line interface based on the Windows PowerShell™ interface. “We scripted the whole migration from Exchange Server 2003 to Exchange Server 2010. Without the Windows PowerShell integration into Exchange Management Shell, we wouldn’t have gotten half as far as we are at the moment,” states Tyson.

Benefits

Baker Tilly expects that upgrading to Exchange Server 2010 will help it to improve disaster recovery and failover times, lower costs, and reduce IT administration. In addition, improving the communications options for its accountants and business advisors will help them provide even better service to its clients.

Improved Disaster Recovery

Using Database Availability Groups, Baker Tilly can re-architect its disaster recovery and failover solution to improve availability and recovery times across the organization. It will also save money, as it will not have to purchase the third-party replication program it was considering for its Exchange Server 2003 environment. “It’s a real benefit to have an enterprise version of disaster recovery and failover built into the Microsoft solution,” says Hilland.

Reduced Costs

Baker Tilly expects to reduce costs for storage and by retiring third-party software. Baker Tilly will take advantage of the reduced disk I/O requirements in Exchange Server 2010 to lower storage costs significantly by switching from small, expensive fiber-channel disks to large, cheap SATA disks. And with Multi-Mailbox Search native to Exchange Server 2010, Baker Tilly will no longer need its current third-party mailbox search program, eliminating that program’s maintenance and licensing costs.

Reduced IT Administration

Thanks to several new features in Exchange Server 2010, the IT department at Baker Tilly expects to manage its messaging environment with less effort. Using RBAC, it can delegate tasks and reduce the burden of the IT administration load, as well as improve the security of its messaging environment. Hilland explains, “RBAC improves our ability to enforce and maintain the security of our systems. In the past, we may have wanted to delegate responsibility to colleagues outside of the infrastructure team, but we were not comfortable doing that in Exchange Server 2003. In Exchange Server 2010, we can appropriately give the right person a job to do, without compromising the core security of our systems.”

Because Baker Tilly can set more specific permissions for administrative tasks, it can also empower employees to manage more of the day-to-day messaging administration themselves, freeing the IT group to focus on infrastructure management and design. Using the self-service features in Exchange Control Panel, for instance, employees no longer have to rely on IT staff to create and manage e-mail distribution lists. Legal and security teams can conduct mailbox searches and place legal holds as the need arises, without having to involve the IT team.

IT administrators can also take advantage of Exchange Management Shell to automate many daily activities. “The scripts for automated migration will put less of a strain on us in the IT department,” says Tyson.

Increased Productivity

By upgrading its current messaging solution to Exchange Server 2010 and Outlook 2010, which offer users a better way to manage and prioritize their e-mail communications, Baker Tilly predicts it will see an increase in employee productivity. Consultants will be able to easily organize and view their e-mail messages by conversation topic and delete redundant e-mail threads. Tyson notes, “Features like Quick Steps and Clean Up Conversation give our people better e-mail management tools that require fewer clicks to achieve results. And these features don’t cost us anything extra in training, because Microsoft Help clearly explains how to get started.”

With its upgrade to Exchange Server 2010, Baker Tilly has consolidated its messaging infrastructure into a highly available environment that better supports its business users while reducing IT administration and costs. The company’s investments in its messaging capabilities help position itself for future growth.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2010
Exchange Server 2010 can help you achieve better business outcomes while controlling the costs of deployment, administration, and compliance. Exchange Server delivers the widest range of deployment options, integrated information leakage protection, and advanced compliance capabilities, that combine to form the best messaging and collaboration solution available.

For more information about Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, go to:
www.microsoft.com/exchange

For more information about Microsoft Unified Communications, go to:
www.microsoft.com/uc

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 Baker Tilly products and services, call 020 7413 5100 or visit the Web site at:
www.bakertilly.co.uk