Telekom Austria

Telecommunications Firm Increases Productivity, Enhances Communication with Unified Solution

Telekom Austria TA AG, (Telekom Austria), is the fixed-net segment of the country’s principal telecommunications company, Telekom Austria Group. Telekom Austria wanted to increase employee productivity and enhance communication internally among teams and externally with customers. As a part of the Microsoft Rapid Deployment Program (RDP), Telekom Austria deployed Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010 to take advantage of its improved communication capabilities. As a result, the company now has a unified communications solution that has increased productivity and improved communication. The company’s IT team also are able to take advantage of the simplified management and flexible deployment enhancements, while increasing network resilience and ensuring network availability for all Telekom Austria employees.

 

Situation

With 2008 revenues close to €5.1 billion (U.S.$7.2 billion) and nearly 17,000 employees, the Telekom Austria Group is the principal telecommunications provider in Austria. The company supplies high-quality services to more than 2.3 million fixed-access lines and more than 17.8 million mobile customers. Following its successful expansion in recent years, the Telekom Austria Group now has operations in Liechtenstein, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Belarus. Telekom Austria TA AG (Telekom Austria), the fixed-net segment of the Telekom Austria Group, not only comprises fixed line telephony but also data and IT solutions, Internet access and media, and value-added and wholesale services.

Telekom Austria used Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007 for e-mail communications. The company, which maintains a leadership position as an early adopter and technological pioneer for communications technology, wanted to provide a unified communications solution to its employees that would improve communication and productivity, as well as reduce overhead costs. In June 2009, Telekom Austria added Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 into its production environment.

The improvements to Outlook Web App are great for our mobile users. They can see all their e-mail, calendar appointments, voice-mail messages and presence information—all right there, all in context. Christoph Wellenzohn Business Development Manager, Telekom Austria TA AG

Telekom Austria continues to look for ways to consolidate and simplify management of its communications platform, while also continuing to improve the communications experience for its workforce. While it found in Office Communications Server 2007 R2 a robust platform for instant messaging, presence, conferencing, and voice capabilities, Telekom Austria was still interested in implementing advanced technology that could help it cut costs and reduce overhead, without sacrificing functionality—or better yet, while continuing to improve it.

Solution

In August 2009, as a member of the Microsoft Rapid Deployment Program (RDP), Telekom Austria took the opportunity to work with Microsoft Services in Austria to plan and deploy an initial pilot of Microsoft Exchange Server 2010. Several factors contributed to its decision to upgrade from Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. “We saw major advantages in two areas,” explains Christoph Wellenzohn, Business Development Manager at Telekom Austria. “First, for employees, we saw improved functionality, including e-mail, calendaring, and voice-mail capabilities. Second, for our IT department, we saw that it created more flexibility and simplified installations.” For employees, Exchange Server 2010 provided a wealth of features that could improve productivity and efficiency, including larger mailboxes and faster search capabilities; improved communications capabilities through the Microsoft Outlook®messaging and collaboration client and Outlook Web App; and greater control over message routing. IT staff were interested in Exchange Server 2010 for its more flexible deployment capabilities, including a streamlined solution for high availability.

Flexible Architecture

One of the main concerns for Telekom Austria was the prevention of e-mail outages and data loss. For its unified communications solution using Exchange Server 2007, Telekom Austria had implemented a Single Copy Cluster solution for high availability. With Exchange Server 2010, the company’s solution will utilize database availability group (DAG) to help protect its Exchange Server environment from a variety of failures at the disk or server level. Using DAG, Telekom Austria can combine on-site data replication and off-site data replication into a single solution, enabling it to reduce the number of active mailbox servers, at a considerable savings. It will also be able to reduce the amount of storage required, because replicated database copies reduce the need for data redundancy at the disk level.

“Multiple copies of our databases and fast failover times mean we’ll be able to rely on the Exchange high-availability architecture to recover quickly from any failures, instead of having to restore from backups,” says Wellenzohn. Telekom Austria plans to start with three database copies per server. Besides reducing mailbox servers, the IT team also plans to virtualize its client access and hub servers.

Enhanced User Experience

Telekom Austria will be able not only to take advantage of increased redundancy and lowered server and storage costs, it will also be able to double the current mailbox sizes for its employees, ensuring that workers can access information they need to do their jobs in a quick and efficient manner.

Telekom Austria is excited about the increased functionality in Exchange Server 2010, which will support its ongoing effort to consolidate communications while providing employees with state-of-the-art technology that they can access from anywhere: their PCs, phones, and Web browsers. “So many of these new features will help us improve our daily work,” says Wellenzohn. For example, Telekom Austria employees using Outlook Web App can take advantage of features like the Nickname Cache. When employees type a name or e-mail address in the To field, they can select the correct item from a list of recently used addresses. The Nickname Cache now extends across devices so that a name entered in Outlook Web App will also appear the next time the user is using Outlook.

Multiple copies of our databases and fast failover times mean we’ll be able to rely on the Exchange high-availability architecture to recover quickly from any failures, instead of having to restore from backups. Christoph Wellenzohn Business Development Manager, Telekom Austria TA AG

“The improvements to Outlook Web App are great for our mobile users. They can see all of their e-mail, calendar appointments, voice-mail messages, and presence information—all right there, all in context,” says Wellenzohn. Using Conversation View, employees can organize all communications—including sent and received e-mail or voice-mail messages, filed conversations, or deleted messages—within the context of a single “conversation” topic. Telekom Austria believes that with this feature, employees will be more productive because they will have the ability to organize information by project or topic. That ability, combined with faster search capabilities and the personal archive, can help workers be more efficient.

By the end of 2009, Telekom Austria plans to move many of its employees to unified messaging. After this move occurs, employees will be able to take advantage of many of the enhanced Unified Messaging features in Exchange Server 2010, including call answering rules, protected voice mail, and voice-mail preview. Employees can use call answering rules to route calls to a specific number or to have special messages play for certain callers. Protected voice mail prevents unauthorized distribution of voice-mail messages by securing message content. Employees can mark voice-mail messages as private, or the IT staff can apply administrative policies using Active Directory® Domain Services that keep employees from forwarding sensitive information to anyone outside the company. Finally, using voice-mail preview, Telekom Austria employees can sift through voice-mail messages via their inbox in the same way as they would review e-mail messages.

Benefits

With the latest addition to its unified communications solution, Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, Telekom Austria is implementing a more flexible architecture that will reduce server and storage costs as well as increase productivity and enhance employee communication.

Increased Productivity

With the upgrade to Exchange Server 2010, Telekom Austria continues to support increased employee productivity. Larger mailboxes and better access to information ensures that employees can handle projects and problems with utmost efficiency. Employees are also able to take advantage of increased Outlook Web App and Outlook Mobile 2010 capabilities, which means that they have anywhere, anytime access to the information and contacts they need.

Enhanced Communication

Workers can improve communication with enhanced remote access through features like the Nickname Cache and voice-mail preview. They can access their latest contact information, view presence (including out-of-office information), and access and respond to voice-mail messages through the Internet or a mobile device. With call answering rules and protected voice mail, they can also better protect and handle sensitive information in a timely manner.

Reduced Server Costs and Simplified Management

By implementing DAG, Telekom Austria will be able to reduce its server hardware, which gives significant savings in both hardware and energy. It will also be able to ensure better availability through more simplified architecture. Taking advantage of virtualization of the Client Access and Hub Transport server roles also removes the need for additional physical servers, offering a cost savings not only in hardware, but in energy as well.

With Exchange Server 2010, Telekom Austria has gained another step in its ongoing efforts to improve its unified communications solution, and thereby increase employee productivity and enhance customer service.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2010
Exchange 2010 can help you achieve better business outcomes while controlling the costs of deployment, administration, and compliance. Exchange 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 Telekom Austria fixed line products and services, call (+43) 59 0 59 1-0 or visit the Web site at:
www.telekom.at