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  • Columbia Sportswear Gives Its Mobile Workforce Fast, Flexible Access to Messages.

  • "With an enterprise communications strategy that has Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 at its center, we can give our users access to their data from anywhere in the world, securely and efficiently."

    Mike Leeper Windows
    Systems Manager
    Columbia Sportswear

    Challenge
    Columbia Sportswear Company is a global leader in the design, production, marketing, and distribution of outdoor apparel and footwear. Based in Portland, Oregon, the company distributes its products to more than 13,000 retailers internationally. Columbia Sportswear continually looks for ways to give its highly mobile workforce faster access to information, which helps to speed the design process and bring products to market more quickly. To support this goal, the company deployed Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007, using Exchange Unified Messaging with its existing telephone infrastructure. Mobile messaging technologies such as Exchange Unified Messaging, Direct Push, and improved Microsoft Office Outlook® Web Access are helping Columbia Sportswear give on-the-go users a flexible yet managed and highly secure way of accessing messages from anywhere that their work or lifestyle takes them.

    Founded in 1938 as a small family-owned hat distributorship, Columbia Sportswear Company is one of the world's largest activewear clothing brands and a leading seller of skiwear in the United States. Its product line includes a wide variety of outerwear, sportswear, footwear, accessories, and outdoor equipment. The company strives to create innovative products that are functional yet stylish.

    Columbia Sportswear was one of the first outerwear companies to make jackets from waterproof/breathable fabric. The company experienced rapid growth in the mid-1980s when it introduced the Bugaboo Parka, a ski jacket that combines a shell and zip-out fleece liner for multiple wearing options. Today, Columbia Sportswear employs more than 2,700 people around the world and distributes and sells products in more than 72 countries through more than 13,000 retailers internationally.

    Gertrude Boyle, Chairman of Columbia Sportswear and-as "Mother Boyle"-the public face of Columbia Sportswear in its advertising campaigns, says that fast access to up-to-date information is key to the company's success. "The sooner you can get your information out and get an answer back, the closer you are to making a perfect garment, to having it shipped-all of the different things that are involved in manufacturing," she says. "The most important thing is contact and information."

    Mike Leeper, Windows Systems Manager at Columbia Sportswear, confirms this. "We send a massive amount of e-mail for an organization our size because we're a worldwide company operating in multiple time zones," he says. "We can't just pick up the phone and call Sri Lanka during our work day. Messaging is the primary form of communication throughout the company. In terms of external communications alone, we send and receive approximately a million e-mail messages a month."

    Because the company's customers, partners, and suppliers are located all over the globe, Columbia Sportswear employees frequently travel for long periods of time. Ron Penrose, System Administrator at Columbia Sportswear, says, "We have approximately 1,000 users who travel more than 40 percent of the time. And when I say 'travel,' I don't mean from a hotel to an office and back again. Our users might travel from an office in Hong Kong to an office in Shanghai for two weeks. While they're on the road they have to use whatever technology is available, whether it's a high-speed broadband connection or a slow, ancient, dial-up modem."

    The active, high-energy corporate culture at Columbia Sportswear means that employees are also frequently away from the office, camping, hiking, or kayaking. Barbara Cason, Associate General Counsel and Director of Intellectual Property at Columbia Sportswear, says, "I think that Columbia Sportswear is a quintessential Northwest kind of company. Those of us who work here are really drawn to the active lifestyle, to products that allow us to enjoy skiing, hiking, running, and all of the things that the Northwest has to offer. But at the same time, my foreign legal associates often need my help with urgent issues outside of our normal business hours. I need to be available to them in a very timely fashion, no matter where I am."

    Columbia Sportswear currently bases its messaging environment on Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003. Most of its mobile users connect with their mailboxes using laptops running the Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003 messaging and collaboration client. Some users carry mobile devices that communicate with the company's messaging system.

    "One of our corporate goals is to increase communication speeds, to gain access to information more quickly than we have in the past," says Leeper. "The enabling technologies will be things like unified voice mail and e-mail, and a more secure and stable messaging environment. We want to speed up our design processes and time-to-market for our products, and anything that we can do to save a couple of hours here or there moves us closer to that goal."

    Solution
    In July 2006, Columbia Sportswear began deploying Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. "Microsoft Exchange Server has a good performance history at Columbia, and we trust it," says Leeper.

    The company's system administrators set up an Exchange Server 2007 environment consisting of two Dell PowerEdge 2850 server computers with dual-core Intel Xeon processors running Microsoft Windows Server® 2003 R2 Standard x64 Edition. Like the rest of the Columbia Sportswear IT infrastructure, the system is monitored using Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 SP1.

    Leeper and Penrose configured one server with the Mailbox server role, and configured the other with the Client Access role. They also configured both servers with Hub Transport and Unified Messaging server roles. "We wanted to add redundancy to Exchange Unified Messaging, but at the same time, we wanted to stay with a traditional messaging architecture," says Penrose. "We added Hub Transport to both in order to provide some redundancy of routing."

    Columbia Sportswear worked with Avtex, a telecommunication solutions vendor, to deploy Exchange Unified Messaging-which provides both e-mail and voice mail services through Exchange Server 2007-with its existing Nortel 2400 IPX phone systems using an Dialogic PBX-IP Media Gateway (PIMG). "Our existing voice mail system was very stable, so we wanted to be as diligent as possible when building the Unified Messaging infrastructure. The new system had to meet or beat the uptime of the old one," says Penrose. "We were able to get Unified Messaging up and running in just a couple of days. Once it was in place, it proved to be extremely reliable."

    In late July, Leeper and Penrose moved their mailboxes and those of 10 other users in the IT department to the new environment. After two weeks, they began migrating other users to the new environment. They also deployed Palm Treo and HTC Wizard devices running Windows Mobile® 5.0 software to create a mobile messaging solution in which traveling users have a variety of ways to connect with their e-mail and voice mail.

    Benefit
    With Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Columbia Sportswear has a unified and flexible messaging solution that meets its needs as a global company that encourages employees to pursue an active lifestyle. The software's security features help protect important company information stored on mobile devices that are carried to cities all over the world-as well as on hiking trails, down rivers, and up mountains. Columbia Sportswear is using Exchange Unified Messaging and server roles to help reduce costs and increase the efficiency of employees on the go. Users who rely on Microsoft Office Outlook Web Access know that they can still get to their messages from locations that have poor phone service.

    Unified Voice Mail and E-mail Exchange
    Unified Messaging, deployed on the company's existing phone systems with the help of communications partner Avtex, is revolutionizing the way Columbia Sportswear employees work and play. Users have access to their e-mail, voice mail, calendar, and contacts, whether they are meeting with distributors in a boardroom in Berlin or rafting down the Columbia River.

    Lee McAtee, Chief Information Officer at Columbia Sportswear, admires the ease of deployment from an IT perspective. "As a busy IT department operating under cost controls, we were pleasantly surprised to discover how easy it was to implement Unified Messaging, without any loss of productivity in our group," he says.

    Columbia Sportswear is using Unified Messaging to help reduce costs and make its operations more efficient. For example, employees who travel to meet with the company's global network of partners, distributors, and suppliers must frequently check the voice mail system; if they miss a message, the differences in time zones can cause significant delays in manufacturing and delivery. Historically, so much telephone traffic has meant high phone charges for the company. Leeper says that Unified Messaging is changing that: "Because our users can access their voice mail messages from their mailboxes, they can avoid the large long-distance phone charges that we've always had to deal with as a company," Leeper says. "It makes employees' lives easier, too. They don't have to figure out how to call the U.S. from every new country that they visit."

    In other circumstances, telephone access to mailbox items might be the ideal solution for a traveling employee. Cason says, "One frustration that I have when I travel in foreign countries is that frequently I don't have the right adapter to hook up my computer. With all of our messaging capability in one place, I can get my phone messages and my e-mail messages with one call."

    Unified Messaging has also helped users who are traveling much shorter distances. Penrose says, "A lot of people use it to send 'I'll be late' messages for meetings they have scheduled in Outlook. I use my mobile phone to check my e-mail on the way to work every morning. When I walk in the door, I don't have to deal with the 75 messages that came in overnight."

    Reliable Web Access to E-mail and Voice Mail
    Outlook Web Access is another vital component of the company's flexible messaging environment. "In some countries, the phones don't work very well," says Mark Sandquist, Vice President of Global Apparel and Equipment at Columbia Sportswear. "Outlook Web Access gives me access to e-mail and voice mail through a Web browser on almost any public computer."

    Secure and Manageable Mobile Messaging Solution
    The company's system administrators are impressed with the security and manageability that Exchange Server 2007 provides to mobile users and are using it and Windows Mobile 5.0 to create a companywide mobile messaging solution. "Exchange Server 2007 Direct Push technology will synchronize our users' mobile devices quickly," says Leeper. "Security features such as Remote Device Wipe and per-user policies give us the confidence to deploy Exchange Server with Windows Mobile powered devices as a solution. This is our corporate data that we're talking about, and we need to protect it."

    This secure, manageable approach extends to other types of communication at the company. For example, the growth of instant messaging has led Columbia Sportswear employees to adopt a disparate mix of third-party instant messaging software tools. To meet this demand for real-time electronic messaging in a standardized way that is highly secure and easy to support, Columbia Sportswear has deployed Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005 Standard Edition to a group of 150 users. Once it is fully implemented, Live Communications Server 2005 will provide antivirus and archiving capabilities to instant messaging companywide, making those communications more secure and audit-ready. "With an enterprise communications strategy that has Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 at its center, we can give our users access to their data from anywhere in the world, securely and efficiently," concludes Leeper.

    Reprinted with permission from Microsoft. Original story here.