CWS Capital Partners is a fully integrated real estate investment management company that specializes in the acquisition, development, reposition, and management of luxury apartments across the USA.
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With over 850 IT users, in a very decentralized environment, CWS runs a virtualized IT infrastructure and has relied on Micro Focus® GroupWise® for many years, as David Greene, VP of IT for CWS, explains: “With our team of 14 IT staff we support everything in-house. We regularly evaluate GroupWise against other alternatives but find its stability and security superior every time. Over the years many useful features have been added. We love the GroupWise Mobility Service which gives us the ability to use it anywhere in a clean and seamless experience. Providing maximum uptime is critical to us and it was great to see that our email network was not affected when a nationwide DNS-error brought down many other companies. We’ve started using other Micro Focus products, such as Retain Unified Archiving, and we were really looking to consolidate our platform and realize license cost savings.”
Micro Focus Enterprise Messaging was introduced just at the right time for CWS. It is a complete collaboration solution that provides organizations with email, scheduling, instant messaging, chat-based teamwork, security, archiving, backup, and disaster recovery. Enterprise Messaging provided the opportunity for CWS to consolidate its infrastructure while saving costs, as Greene comments: “A couple of years ago we migrated from Sonian, a cloudbased email archiving solution, to Retain Unified Archiving. The main reason was that Sonian withdrew GroupWise support. Once we made the decision though, we discovered it was difficult to retrieve our 16 years of email data from the cloud. We much rather keep control of our data on-premise, and Retain gave us this. With Retain now included in Enterprise Messaging we can consolidate our license structure.”
Enterprise Messaging opens up some great opportunities for further employee collaboration. Greene and his team are excited about exploring chat-based teamwork, a social collaboration tool to help teams communicate and work together better. Having both email and dynamic conversation-driven workspaces shouldn’t be an either/or decision. With Enterprise Messaging, CWS has both email and chat-driven teamwork in a single interface that enables users to move seamlessly between the two. Greene is also looking forward to rolling out Messenger, a cross-platform, mobileenabled enterprise instant messaging tool that takes all of the risk out of using instant messaging in the workplace.
Enterprise Mailbox Management enables the CWS IT team to manage a mailbox without having to log onto it from the GroupWise management console. They can take complete control of users’ proxy rights for both single and multiple selected users. Proxy access rights can be easily changed by adding or removing users from the proxy access list. Mailbox Management also enables CWS to report, print, and export data at the system, domain, post office, and user levels.
CWS relies on Retain for regulation compliance reasons, as Greene explains: “We operate in heavily regulated market places and unfortunately have to deal with occasional lawsuits. It is imperative that we are able to retrieve relevant emails quickly and effectively; Retain delivers this. We will explore the use of Enterprise Messaging Forensics in this context as well. This will ensure that only cleared users have access to our communication data and that the mailbox is not modified in any way.”
Finally, Enterprise Messaging features fully comprehensive and customizable monitoring and reporting. The simple, intuitive dashboard quickly evaluates the health of all the messaging, security, archiving, and disaster recovery systems.
Although Enterprise Messaging is still in its early days with CWS, Greene can already see the benefits: “When we looked at moving away from GroupWise it soon became clear that we would need to add IT staff to support Office 365. The new Enterprise Messaging implementation is easily managed with our current resources and we love the consolidated approach with many more collaboration opportunities to explore.”
He concludes: “The support from Micro Focus has been great. When we upgraded to Enterprise Messaging we worried about the database conversion part and scheduled it for a Friday night so that we would have the weekend to rectify any problems. As it was, we were up and running in no time and my team could relax over the weekend.”
