Customers: Education: Case Study
Central University of Technology Increases Collaboration Amongst More Than 10,000 Students and 1,000 Staff
WHY SCALIX?
CUT needed a single solution to fit the diverse needs of their end users and administrators. They were looking for a solution that offered flexibility and cross-platform interoperability.
“With SWA and its caching architecture, we have seen a major reduction in the amount of bandwidth needed to support email, and as a result, our local email usage has increased by 360%”
Ernst du Plooy
Manager: Network and IT Security
Central University of Technology
From an administrative perspective, they were able to consolidate the number of servers required to support their organization from 5 to 3 and integrate their directory with Scalix to have a single point of administration. End users also benefited greatly. CUT was able to provide their staff with the Outlook support they desired without having to implement Active Directory or deal with the management of Exchange, and the students now had a web client, Scalix Web Access (SWA), with almost identical features and functionality as if using a desktop client. Because students had been resorting to hotmail, yahoo and other free messaging solutions, these low-function email clients had been using a significant amount of the university’s network bandwidth.
“With SWA and its caching architecture, we have seen a major reduction in the amount of bandwidth needed to support email, and as a result, our local email usage has increased by 360%” said Ernst du Plooy, Manager: Network and IT Security.
BOTTOM LINE
Scalix’s robust email foundation, derived from Scalix’s licensing of HP OpenMail from Hewlett Packard, helped make Scalix a messaging leader in terms of reliability and scalability, which greatly influenced CUT’s decision to use Scalix. The migration from Exchange to Scalix was seamless -- even advanced Outlook users saw no disruption and continued to work as normal. Impressed by the support from both Conversant Systems and Scalix, du Plooy stated, “The support we received was by far the best we have experienced on any email system. Everything just worked.”