First Technology gains customer confidence with MS

First Technology is one of SA's leading single-source providers of IT products and solutions. Because e-mail is a business-critical tool internally and for its customers, it deployed Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 in its own production environment to understand and experience the latest architecture and capabilities.

Using a broad range of skills and technologies, First Technology delivers IT products and services that support business-critical infrastructures and processes to businesses and organisations of all sizes and across every industry. The company supports many Microsoft business solutions, including Active Directory services, Exchange Server, System Center Configuration Manager, Lync Server, and the Windows Server 2008 operating system with Hyper-V virtualisation technology.

First Technology employees rely on e-mail to communicate with each other, with customers and with vendors and suppliers.

"If our e-mail services go down even for a few hours, the business can lose thousands of dollars," says Eugene Maritz, services manager at First Technology.

Maritz and his team manage the data centre that supports the branch offices and sister companies inside First Technology. Internally, the IT team had deployed Microsoft Exchange Server 2010. It ran the Exchange Server 2010 roles - Mailbox, Client Access and Edge Transport - on one server in a virtual environment running Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V. It supports about 340 mailboxes of various sizes: management receives 5GB of space; salespeople receive 2GB and field technicians receive 500MB. Employees primarily use Microsoft Outlook 2010 to manage e-mail. First Technology also deployed Exchange Unified Messaging, so employees can access and respond to voicemail messages through Outlook 2010.

When First Technology learned about Microsoft Exchange Server 2013, it joined the Microsoft Rapid Deployment Program so that it could evaluate the new technology for customers. "We were not facing any challenges with our Exchange Server 2010 environment," says Francois Joubert, technical consultant at First Technology. "We were interested in evaluating the technology to see how we could improve our environment and as a base for future deployments."

As one of the largest Microsoft licensing partners in SA, First Technology wants to grow with Microsoft so that it can show customers it can manage the latest technology. Maritz explains, "We have a saying in South Africa: 'drink your own champagne'. By deploying Exchange Server 2013 in our own environment, we show customers that we share the same experience."

First Technology implemented Exchange Server 2013 in a configuration identical to its Exchange Server 2010 deployment with all of the Exchange roles on a single server. It is continuing to use the same HP storage area network with Fiber Channel disks for storage. For redundancy, the company relies on failover clustering in its Hyper-V environment; and for backup, it uses the Data Protection Manager component of Microsoft System Center 2012. To provide anti-virus protection, it will continue to use Microsoft Exchange Online Protection.

Originally published by Microsoft. To read more, click here.