About the Company
Part of the Cello market research and consulting group, Tangible was formed in early 2008 from the merger of seven creative design, advertising, and PR companies. The result was a solutions-oriented, planning-led marketing communications group with specialist businesses focused on advertising, direct, data, digital, design, and PR. With offices in London, Edinburgh, Cheltenham and Cirencester, employing 330 people and with a turnover in excess of £60 million, it has become one of the UK’s largest integrated marketing communications groups. From a technology perspective, Tangible is a Novell stronghold that standardises on OES2. On the front end, the firm leverages a number of graphic design applications running on the Mac OS. For collaboration, the organisation uses GroupWise.
Rolling Out GroupWise 8
Recently, Tangible was among the pilot organisations to upgrade to GroupWise 8, which Novell is officially releasing later this year. David Watson, IT Manager at Tangible, explains what prompted the organization to opt to be among the early adopters of GroupWise 8.
"Because of the nature of our company’s business, we have a considerable number of Mac users. Unfortunately, until now the GroupWise Mac client was quite deficient and a source of frustration for some of our end users. The new Mac client featured in GroupWise 8 shows significant improvements in functionality and display. In fact, users of both Mac and Linux clients have a lot to benefit from in GroupWise 8. Overall, the new GroupWise 8 client offers a greatly improved interface and a lot of flexibility for customizing and personalizing it."
The second reason that gave Watson confidence in his undertaking for early migration is Tangible’s close relationship with NDS8, one of the leading providers of Novell and Linux services in the UK. "Tim Heywood is well known and respected in the Novell community. He was there to help with the roll-out and any migration-related issues we experienced were resolved quickly. Overall, it was a smooth upgrade that we were able to accomplish in one evening with only a few minutes of downtime," continues Watson.
Granting Flexibility and Control to Employees with M+Guardian
To secure their GroupWise environment, the Tangible Group has been using M+Guardian from Messaging Architects for years. Prior to M+Guardian’s implementation, the IT Department employed a couple of other products. These proved unsuccessful either because they exposed the email system to security vulnerabilities or were received negatively by end users.
Watson discusses the reasons why an anti-spam solution that provides his end users with flexible options was so important in their selection of M+Guardian. "The product we were using before wasn’t reliable, and the spam catch and false positive rates weren’t good. Addresses that had been white listed by users were being trapped, yet people didn’t have real-time access to their individual spam quarantines. There were hourly digests, but for some employees that wasn’t fast enough. In today’s dynamic environment, being an hour late may very well mean a lost deal. In short, there was a lot of user resentment with that product and we realised we had to do something to fix the situation."
Even though they were only halfway through the service contract, the IT Department decided to find a solution that would meet the needs of the various departments. At NDS8’s recommendation, they began an evaluation of M+Guardian. They really put the appliance to the test and solicited extensive feedback from a variety of users. The overall response was very positive.
"Not only did we observe a visible reduction in spam, we were able to grant our users what they had been asking for so long - real-time access to their spam quarantine from any browser at any time and as many times a day as they wished to access it. Our employees were thrilled with this level of freedom to manage their own email without having to resort to the helpdesk."
From a management perspective, Watson considers M+Guardian’s web interface well-designed and logically laid out. Filters are easy to set up and the modules are simple to find and track. The fact that it’s a Linux-based appliance is an additional advantage with its superior control and reliability. He is also very pleased with the level of service he receives from the Messaging Architects-UK division.
"It took some trial and error before M+Guardian, but in the end we found the solution that not only simplifies our email security management, but more importantly, has made our employees extremely happy," concludes Watson.
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