Bank Boosts Efficiency, Improves Replication Capabilities with New Messaging Solution

Sasfin Bank, based in Johannesburg, South Africa, is an independent banking and financial services organization with seven locations throughout the country. Sasfin was founded in 1951 and listed on the JSE Securities Exchange South Africa in 1987. The company, which has 460 employees, provides a portfolio of products and services designed to facilitate business growth and help individuals and business customers create and protect wealth.

Sasfin Bank is organized into distinct divisions that deal with separate business areas. The divisions are Business Banking, Rental Finance, Capital, Private Equity, Corporate Finance, and Personal Wealth. Employees in Business Banking, which is the bank’s largest focus area, work from offices in all seven Sasfin Bank locations. Because these offices are so widely dispersed, employees depend on e-mail to communicate with one another, send customer-related questions to supervisors, and collaborate on various projects.

For the past several years, the organization has used the Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003 e-mail environment to manage employee messaging capabilities. “E-mail in particular is our main form of communication, and we need to guarantee the reliability of that and all forms of messaging, which is why we use Exchange Server 2003,” says Dawie Olivier, General Manager for IT, Sasfin Bank.

Bank employees are also frequently away from their offices, traveling to other Sasfin Bank locations for meetings or customer service training. Many of these workers use cell phones and mobile devices to stay on top of work projects and issues. “A lot of people here need to check voice-mail and e-mail messages while they’re on the road,” says Lourens van Dyk, Infrastructure Architect, Sasfin Bank. To check e-mail, employees use Microsoft Office Outlook® Web Access. “Our employees are very heavy users of Outlook Web Access,” he adds. “They depend on it to do their jobs.”

Bank employees in remote offices also need to regularly attend important staff meetings with colleagues in the main Johannesburg office. Although Sasfin Bank used Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005 to handle audio conferencing and collaboration needs, it had been using a third-party video conferencing solution for online meetings. “That solution wasn’t reliable, nor did it offer us good video quality,” says van Dyk. “Because of the growing importance of video conferences, we really needed to upgrade that technology.”

In addition, Sasfin Bank sought a new solution that could help in terms of compliance. “Because we’re in the banking industry, we have many regulatory issues to deal with, and we need to store every e-mail message and every piece of customer information,” remarks Olivier. “However, we needed a better way to handle archiving and compliance.”

Also, because it needs to store so much sensitive customer financial data, backup and recovery are also important to the bank. “It was very important to us to find software that would offer us better replication and disaster recovery capabilities than we had,” says Olivier.

In late 2006, the bank began its search for a new solution that would help meet some of these important business needs.
 

Sasfin Bank formed the basis of its new solution by implementing Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 throughout its IT infrastructure in December 2006. Several months later, the organization deployed the unified messaging functionality of that product, which includes built-in tools that give employees access to e-mail, voice-mail, and fax messages in their Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 messaging and collaboration client inbox, from wherever they are working. Using Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging, Sasfin Bank workers across South Africa can use their cell phones and laptop computers to manage e-mail and calendar information.

In July 2007, the bank also began migrating from Live Communications Server 2005 to Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, which features advanced video conferencing, enhanced presence awareness, and additional features providing a “better together” experience with Exchange Server 2007.

Finally, also in July, Sasfin Bank deployed Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1). This enhanced version of Exchange Server 2007 includes new features designed to improve both the IT administrator and user experiences. For instance, the product contains standby continuous replication (SCR) for companies that use Exchange Server 2007 clustering in multiple data center environments. With this feature, enterprises can quickly recover from extended power outages and other failures because mailbox data is continuously replicated to a standby server computer in another data center.

Additionally, Exchange Server 2007 SP1 includes enhanced Office Outlook Web Access features, such as monthly calendar views, recovery of deleted items, and public folder accessibility. With these capabilities, Sasfin Bank employees can have access to information when they are away from the office, through an interface they are already familiar with.

Exchange Server 2007 SP1 also contains features that increase integration with Office Communications Server 2007, giving users of both products the ability to retrieve voice-mail messages from the Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 client with a single mouse click, without requiring a password.

Exchange Server 2007 SP1 also integrates with Microsoft Forefront™ Security for Exchange Server SP1, providing built-in security and more centralized security management for Sasfin Bank.

For Sasfin Bank, deployment was seamless and was phased to 13 server computers over a two-week period.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 SP1 provides Sasfin Bank IT managers with the ability to administer the e-mail environment more efficiently, while also improving replication and recovery efforts for the bank. The solution also improves security, provides better integration with Office Communications Server 2007, and gives employees who work out of the office easier access to e-mail, voice mail, and other critical information.

More Efficient Administration
Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 SP1 provides Sasfin Bank IT with more efficient IT administration.“The rule-based controls feature for internal and external e-mail management is something that we’re really happy with in Exchange Server 2007 SP1,” says Olivier. “It helps improve efficiency for us in terms of overall IT administration.”

The new solution also includes improved archiving and storage capabilities. “With Exchange Server 2007 SP1, we can keep all archives completely separate from the mailbox server,” says van Dyk. “From an archiving and storage standpoint, that makes it much easier to administer.”

Improved Replication and Recovery
The Sasfin Bank IT department is also taking advantage of the solution’s new, improved replication and recovery features. Sasfin Bank had already deployed the cluster continuous replication (CCR) feature in Exchange Server 2007 in the company’s data center. Now, IT managers can add SCR to the bank’s existing CCR option.

With this capability, managers can use a single mailbox server computer and a mailbox cluster to replicate to a standby server computer, which can be set up on-site or in an off-site data center. “With standby continuous replication available in Exchange Server 2007 SP1, we now have the ability to create a distributed cluster of mailboxes used at multiple geographic sites, so that at any time, more than one site can be replicated,” says Olivier.

Sasfin Bank can now recover more quickly in the event of a power outage that affects the entire data center because all mailbox data is replicated continuously to a standby server computer offsite. “Standby continuous replication is absolutely essential for us in terms of our ability to maintain high availability,” says Olivier. “The distributed process and e-mail recovery capabilities of Exchange Server 2007 SP1 are huge advantages for us in terms of disaster recovery.”

Increased Security
Sasfin Bank is also experiencing improved security because of new controls in Exchange Server 2007 SP1. “In the past, it was highly likely that e-mail would be freely passed around internally, but that is no longer possible with the new rules we can put into place with Exchange Server 2007 SP1,” says Olivier.

Additionally, Exchange Server 2007 also includes seamless integration with Microsoft Forefront Security for Exchange Server SP1, which the organization had already deployed. The new service pack for Forefront Security for Exchange Server includes improved content filtering and manageability features, which help provide easier security management. “With Forefront Security for Exchange Server 2007 SP1 deployed, we’ve been able to move different parts of the e-mail server infrastructure out, so we can have mail stores in one place and distribution hubs in other locations on the network,” says Olivier. “As a result, managing network security is much simpler and will be more effective for us.”

Better Communications Integration
The new solution also provides Sasfin Bank with better integration between Exchange Server 2007 and Office Communications Server 2007, which the company is in the process of implementing.

With Exchange Server 2007 SP1, Office Communications Server 2007 users are able to use the Office Communicator 2007 client to quickly check e-mail or listen to voice-mail messages through one-click access to Microsoft Office Outlook Voice Access. “Better integration with Office Communications Server 2007 means that our users can take full advantage of that product’s collaborative functionality,” says Olivier. “Bank employees can use presence to easily see if another person is available to communicate or collaborate with. And employees can also quickly set up an audio or video conference from their PCs through Office Communicator 2007.”

Easier Employee Access
Because Exchange Server 2007 SP1 features Outlook Web Access improvements, such as deleted-item recovery and monthly calendar views, Sasfin Bank employees can have even easier access to important information when they are not in the office. The new Outlook Web Access also features a user interface that is very similar to the Outlook interface Sasfin Bank employees work in every day. “Our users love Outlook Web Access,” says Olivier. “It looks, feels, and acts exactly like the desktop Outlook version they’re used to. As a result, they are not giving up large chunks of functionality to be able to access it from anywhere in the world. That has driven adoption massively.”

Using this new version of Outlook Web Access, along with Exchange Server 2007 SP1 and Office Communications Server 2007, Sasfin Bank remote employees have better communications capabilities than before. “Instead of switching between different applications for e-mail and voice mail, for example, employees spend less time and effort getting the information they need every day,” Olivier says. “Because voice mail is delivered into users’ mailboxes just like e-mail, they can use Outlook Web Access on their laptops or Outlook Voice Access through their phone to listen to voice mail when they’re not in the office. That’s a powerful capability for us as a company.”