Canadian Solution Provider Helps Transport Company Roll Out Unified Communications
With nine Microsoft® Gold Certified competencies, LegendCorp delivers innovative solutions for security, infrastructure, and collaboration across the enterprise. When transportation services provider Canada Cartage wanted to unify its voice and messaging systems to connect its 25 locations across Canada, LegendCorp worked with the company to implement a unified communications solution by using Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007. LegendCorp integrated the solution with the carrier’s existing infrastructure and overcame challenges such as connecting it with a complex PBX system. Canada Cartage anticipates reduced costs associated with travel and long-distance phone charges. Sales teams that build transport solutions for customers can work together more effectively with features that turn instant-messaging conversations into group conference calls with shared whiteboards.
Situation
LegendCorp is a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner in Toronto, Ontario, that provides its customers with end-to-end technology solutions for business. Founded in 1989, it is currently the only Microsoft partner in Canada with Gold certifications in nine competencies. LegendCorp won the Microsoft Network Infrastructure Partner of the Year award in 2007 and two Global Microsoft Partner of the Year awards in 2006.
“The value of the Microsoft proposition, especially within the last four or five years, has been in software integration. We wanted to have a company that fit that same model,” says Andy Papadopoulos, President of LegendCorp. “When a client begins a project to deploy new technology, a lot of questions come up about how the deployment will affect everything else in the customer’s IT environment. When those questions arise, we don’t want to have to refer them to other partners that specialize in all of those different areas. We supply a total solution across the Microsoft technology stack, including security, infrastructure, and business processes.”
One of those customers is Canada Cartage, a dedicated logistics and warehousing company that is also based in Toronto. Founded in 1914 as a family-owned business, Canada Cartage offers a complete range of transportation services and specializes primarily in Customer-Domiciled Dedicated Fleets. Under this arrangement, a company outsources its transportation and logistics operations to Canada Cartage, which one of the first carriers to offer this service to Canadian enterprises. Now one of the largest carriers in the country, it supplies dedicated fleet and warehousing solutions to more than 60 companies.
Mo Eisen, Vice President of Information Technology at Canada Cartage, says, “For much of its history, Canada Cartage was not a very high-tech company. For several years, we had a single Linux-based system for everything we did: finance, operations, maintenance, and so on. Then in 2004, we started the transition process and migrated to an all-Microsoft environment.”
Canada Cartage relied on a Nortel Business Communications Manager (BCM) 400 Private Branch Exchange (PBX) for its telephony services, along with a variety of third-party services and products from different local telecommunications companies to connect locations across Canada. The business grew rapidly, particularly through acquisition, and the system’s capacity was strained to its limits. Much of its communications infrastructure was out of the IT department’s control, making it difficult to manage costs. Another problem was the poor voice quality of local telecommunications operators in some of the remote locations where the company has offices. Canada Cartage became interested in new technologies that integrated voice mail, e-mail, instant messaging, audio conferencing, and video conferencing in one unified communications solution.
Solution
Canada Cartage researched unified communications solutions from four major vendors. It believed that it had come to a conclusion about which one to deploy, but then learned about Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007.
“When Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 came into the picture, it changed our whole thought process about unified communications,” says Eisen. “Microsoft products integrate so well that we questioned the value of implementing another vendor’s solution in our environment, when we could just install Office Communications Server 2007 and the integration would be built in.”
In May 2007, Canada Cartage met with its Microsoft account representative and experts from LegendCorp to discuss the company’s communications environment, the Microsoft unified communications road map, and the potential benefits of Office Communications Server 2007 to its operations. LegendCorp was able to speak from firsthand experience: as a member of the Microsoft Voice Partner Program, it had implemented the Microsoft unified communications solution internally earlier in the year. It was the first partner in Canada to deploy the solution and complete all of the milestones necessary to achieve the program’s Verification Complete requirement.
In addition to the ease of integration, Canada Cartage liked how Office Communications Server 2007 users could easily escalate conversations: for example, going from instant messaging to e-mail, phone, or video with a click of a mouse button. It also saw value in presence awareness, which would help employees work more efficiently by showing them which of their colleagues was available to talk at a given moment, and how best to reach them.
Working with LegendCorp, Canada Cartage began its unified communications deployment in early July 2007. The solution consisted of Office Communications Server 2007 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 installed on Windows Server® 2003 Enterprise and Standard Edition operating systems, integrated with the company’s existing Active Directory® service. The team installed Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 on users’ workstations. It also tested a variety of voice over IP (VoIP) devices and Windows Mobile® phones in the pilot phase. The team also deployed the first Microsoft RoundTable™ conferencing and collaboration devices in Canada. RoundTable offers synchronized voice and video conferencing with a 360-degree, panoramic view of everyone in the conference room.
The team tested the solution in a consolidated topology with three Dell server computers. The server that ran Office Communications Server 2007 and the Mediation Server were deployed internally. The Mediation Server was connected to an IP gateway to connect the Office Communications Server 2007 environment to the existing Nortel BCM 400 PBX. The Office Communications Server 2007 Edge Server, which served as an Access Edge Server and Audio/Video Edge Server, was installed in the perimeter network (also known as DMZ, demilitarized zone, and screened subnet) to facilitate remote user access and external meeting scenarios.
The project team chose to perform a staged rollout rather than deploy and activate everything at once. Says Papadopoulos, “Office Communications Server 2007 is not a rip-and-replace solution, nor do you have to turn all of its features on at day one. One of the mistakes that a lot of vendors can make is to turn everything on at once. This can overwhelm and confuse people in the organization and make the deployment very complicated. We begin by showing the client what its new communications environment will look like when we’re finished. Then we phase in the solution in a manageable way, adding modules as the client sees fit.”
A single Mediation Server—which is the technology that provides Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) and PBX interoperability for Office Communications Server 2007—was installed at the Canada Cartage head office together with an AudioCodes Mediant 1000 VoIP Media Gateway with two T1 spans.
One of the project’s notable achievements was when LegendCorp successfully implemented Office Communications Server 2007 with the Nortel BCM 400 PBX. The PBX configuration at Canada Cartage was highly complicated, with two BCM devices that run in parallel with different versions of software and connected T1 lines.
The pilot deployment, completed in December 2007, was rolled out to 20 users. In the future, Canada Cartage will extend the solution to 500 office-based employees in 25 locations across Canada. It also plans to build a redundant system at its data center in Winnipeg to provide business continuity and disaster-recovery capabilities.
Benefits
Office Communications Server 2007 helps LegendCorp customers such as Canada Cartage to extend the capabilities of their existing IT environments with an integrated software solution. Users can communicate and collaborate in a unified and highly flexible environment, which makes operations more efficient. With solutions like Office Communications Server 2007 and a strong partnership with Microsoft, LegendCorp can provide its clients with exceptional end-to-end voice solutions to meet their unique business needs.
Integration with Existing IT Assets
Because Office Communications Server 2007 does not require a “rip-and-replace” approach to deployment, LegendCorp sees it as highly advantageous to clients such as Canada Cartage that want to extend the capabilities of its existing environment, rather than invest time and money to implement an entirely new system.
“When we help clients deploy Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, we’re connecting everything they rely on today to run their organizations,” says Papadopoulos.
“They can integrate the solution with their existing software and run it on their existing hardware. If they want to keep using PBX features that overlap with the Microsoft solution’s functionality, we can easily accommodate that. You don’t give up anything: Office Communications Server 2007 works on the network you already own.”
More Efficient Communication
The logistics of running a fast-growing, continent-spanning transportation company can be daunting. At Canada Cartage, it’s important to be able to reach people quickly and easily to get necessary information, respond to changing circumstances, and plan for the future.
“Presence awareness in Office Communications Server 2007 helps us to communicate and plan more effectively,” says Eisen. “I’ve got people that work for me across the country who are extremely busy. When I need resources from that office I can instantly see who is available to help with whatever issue I’m working on at the time.”
The ability to quickly switch from one mode of communication to another is also valuable to Canada Cartage employees. “When our sales team is working to design a solution for a customer, they can use Office Communications Server 2007 to communicate in very flexible ways. A two-person instant-message conversation can easily expand into an audio conference with a shared whiteboard for more intense collaboration. As users become accustomed to it, I can envision this agile way of working together spreading throughout the company to every area of the business.”
Eisen finds that unified communications helps him to be much more productive during the workday. “With Office Communications Server 2007, I can manage the flow of incoming information in ways that respect my time and energy. All of my contacts are in one place and accessible through my mobile phone and my workstation, so I don’t have to manage multiple address books. I can see who is calling me and redirect the call to another number or to voice mail. I can also set up automated rules that do the same thing based on my current availability.”
Reduced Travel and Telephony Costs
LegendCorp reports that deploying Office Communications Server 2007 helps its clients reduce costs associated with communication and collaboration across long distances. By using Office Communications Server 2007, companies like Canada Cartage can reduce their dependence on third-party solutions such as WebEx and manage their own internal conferencing resources. By providing employees with a richer conferencing experience—including video, file-sharing capabilities, shared desktops, and VoIP communication—Canada Cartage has reduced the need for travel, eliminated external conferencing, and expects significant savings on costs associated with travel and long-distance phone use.
An End-to-End Solution
LegendCorp defines itself as a partner that can provide an end-to-end solution for its clients. Office Communications Server 2007 lends itself well to this approach through its tight integration with a Microsoft-based environment and its ease of implementation and management.
“Office Communications Server 2007 ties in to Active Directory, to Exchange Server, to Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007, to telephony,” says Papadopoulos. “It’s a very effective way to meet a whole array of clients’ needs with a comprehensive solution that they can easily manage and maintain themselves when the deployment is finished.”
Strong Partnership with Microsoft
As a member of the Microsoft Voice Partner Program, LegendCorp has the support it needs to develop effective voice solutions for its clients. “Microsoft shares its vision and road map with us, as well as millions of dollars worth of analyst data that we don’t normally have access to as a smaller company,” Papadopoulos says. “That information helps us to build a business around the opportunities and demands of the market. It’s a level of support that we don’t get from other vendors, and it’s why we place so much stock in Microsoft.”