Joe Levi:
a cross-discipline, multi-dimensional problem solver who thinks outside the box – but within reality™

Lifetime Products and why they chose to move to Microsoft Exchange Server 2010

Everyone who follows my blog knows that I love to live on the cutting edge of technology. I’ve been running Windows 7 at home for the last several months, I beta tested Microsoft OneCare and Security Essentials before either one of them hit the public. I’ve even played around with Office 2010!

While all of that is fine and dandy at home, living on the edge at work usually comes back to bite you in the … well, it’s usually not a good idea.

That having been said, my employer, Lifetime Products recently made the switch to Microsoft Exchange 2010. For those of you who don’t know, Exchange is Microsoft’s “Swiss Army Knife” server application. It’s an email host with LDAP & contact capabilities, it handles schedules and calendars, tasks and to-do lists, voice messaging, fax, unified messaging, syncing to Windows Phones (formerly known as Windows Mobile, formerly known as Pocket PC) and iPhones, and a whole bunch more stuff that I can’t possibly cover in a short article.

Crystal Flores, Exchange Program Manager for Microsoft has headed out on the road to talk with some “early adopters” of Microsoft Exchange 2010. Her first stop was Lifetime Products, right here in Clearfield, Utah.

Crystal interviewed Lifetime’s Richard Hendrickson, President; John Bowden, CIO; and Vince Rohton, Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing. Some of the more notable advantages and features mentioned in Crystal’s interviews included the ability for Lifetime to eliminate their desk phones and offer one number to their customers and clients, which is completely transparent to our customers.

They estimate a savings for $1,000 per year for each desk phone replaced or not deployed because of the power of Exchange 2010. By putting email, contact, voicemail, text messaging, and phone calls all one one mobile device, all this information is available where ever that employee goes.

Lifetime Products’ Exchange 2010 deployment serves their facilities and employees in China, Mexico, and all their USA users as well, all hosted in one data center, on a single instance of Exchange 2010. That’s impressive. What’s more impressive is that they don’t need a dedicated Exchange Administrator to do it all.

The same technology that Lifetime Products uses also empowers employees of their online store BuyLifetime.com and their brick-and-mortar BackyardsInc.com stores as well.

CIO Magazine has a great article that features some more details about Lifetime’s adoption of Exchange 2010 titled Exchange 2010: Five Reasons Why I’m Upgrading and  has posted a video interview with John Bowden.

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