Large Scale Email Messaging & Collaboration
Email is now the predominant form of communication in enterprises. Calendaring has emerged as the accepted method for scheduling and coordinating meetings. The expansion of the mobile workforce and ready availability of Internet access has driven the collaboration suites to the “edge” of the enterprise networks. Users and businesses now require that these services be available 7x24 and accessible from anywhere. It’s difficult to imagine life before its widespread adoption over the last decade. The very power of these services has also attracted a large and growing number of security threats – spam, fraud, viruses, regulatory violations and intellectual property theft. In environments such as higher education there is the additional burden of a large number of changes due to new users and role changes as students graduate or move to faculty positions. Traditional messaging solutions are stretched to handle this volume and management of this environment has become very costly. Initial costs include the cost for licensing additional users, systems for handling the volume, compliance and archiving needs, solutions for integration to web and mobile services, and integration with existing and new infrastructure for messaging like voice, fax and instant messaging. Ongoing costs for maintaining these infrastructures continue to increase due to increased complexity and scale. The inability of many traditional solutions to allow the flexibility to integrate and embrace new technologies also limits many institutions, this soft cost can have a severely negative impact on the business. To address these issues many organizations have looked at outsourcing some or all of their collaboration services.
Utilizing open source software significantly reduces the cost of entry and embraces emerging technologies.
Outsourcing the entire infrastructure has not proved to be a more cost effective solution, since outsourcing has traditionally meant that some level of service compromise was required. Outsourcing with the same software and infrastructure also meant that customers were stuck with same issues discussed previously. The concept of “Tiered messaging” services has come to the forefront recently. In this approach, institutions define a core group of users to offer full functionality. They then offer different services to everyone else. This groups mail could be run on cheaper infrastructure, or outsourced. Examples of this have been attempted at several higher education facilities where faculty and staff email is managed by the institution and student mail is outsourced. The entry into the marketplace by Google Apps for Education is an example of this type of service. Issues with this approach include the lack of integration of between the 2 systems e.g. Inability to have a consistent calendaring standard; migration of users from one environment to another is difficult; and with outsourced solution the concerns about exposing identities of users abound. Scalar Coordinates is designed to address these issues. Built on easily scalable infrastructure, this single collaboration platform supports the largest of institutions. Utilizing open source software significantly reduces the cost of entry and embraces emerging technologies. It supports traditional mail and calendaring client and offers a no compromise web based client. This removes the costs associated with managing client software. This solution is offered as packaged solution hosted and operated by the client, or as a hosted solution by Scalar Managed Services.