Florida’s Leading Law Firm Selects Azaleos to Manage its E-Mail

Stearns Weaver Miller Weissler Alhadeff & Sitterson, P.A Moves from Novell Groupwise to Remotely Managed Microsoft Exchange and Blackberry Service

Azaleos® Corporation, the managed unified communications services company, today announced that Florida’s leading law firm, Stearns Weaver Miller Weissler Alhadeff & Sitterson, P.A. (Stearns Weaver), has replaced its Novell Groupwise installation with Azaleos remotely managed e-mail services for Microsoft Exchange and Blackberry Enterprise Server. The Azaleos service, which leverages patented technology to maintain e-mail data and infrastructure on the customer premise, provides dial-tone levels of e-mail availability for the firm’s more than 300 users.

Stearns Weaver is a full service law firm with over 120 attorneys serving clients throughout Florida and nationwide. With offices in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Tampa, and Tallahassee, the firm serves clients that range from small businesses and entrepreneurs to Fortune 500 companies and major financial institutions. The care and feeding of its aging Novell Groupwise system coupled with the prospect of designing and maintaining a new Exchange Server infrastructure was taxing the resources of the company’s IT staff, which was also required to manage a separate Blackberry Enterprise Server for mobile users.

“We rely on the timely and reliable exchange of information in order to serve our clients. Without e-mail, everything grinds to a stop. Even though it is critical to our business, managing the infrastructure was draining our IT staff,” said Eugene Cabreja, IT Director for Stearns Weaver Miller Weissler Alhadeff & Sitterson. “We chose Azaleos based on their stellar track record for meeting service level guarantees, and unique ability to remotely manage our Exchange and Blackberry infrastructures so that we can keep e-mail data on-site. From a regulatory and e-discovery standpoint, this is extremely important for us as a law firm.”

Migration from Groupwise to Virtualized Exchange

To facilitate the move from an existing Groupwise infrastructure, Azaleos experts worked with Stearns Weaver to suggest a new best practice Exchange e-mail system design and then managed all aspects of the data migration to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. This included deploying Exchange in a high availability/clustered configuration running on VMware infrastructure. By virtualizing Exchange server, Azaleos helped Stearns Weaver reduce energy consumption and cut from four to two the number of physical servers required to support both Exchange and Blackberry Enterprise Server in a fault tolerant architecture.

Worry Free Exchange and Blackberry Services

In addition to remotely managing Exchange Server, Azaleos is handling the administration of Stearns Weaver’s Blackberry Enterprise Server infrastructure. With more than 120 attorneys, the firm has a large contingent of Blackberry users who exchange confidential information using these smartphones. The Azaleos services provide Stearns Weaver with a cost structure similar to hosted email as well as zero maintenance for their fixed and mobile infrastructure. Azaleos experts at its two network operations centers continuously monitor, manage, patch, update, and fix any issues that arise in Stearns Weaver’s Exchange and BlackBerry servers before users even know a problem exists.

“Law firms, like Stearns Weaver Miller Weissler Alhadeff & Sitterson, are information intensive businesses that live and die by their e-mail service,” said Scott Gode, vice president of product management and marketing for Azaleos. “However, managing Microsoft Exchange and BlackBerry servers, which is time consuming and complex, is not a core competency for the typically undermanned IT staff at a law firm. For a fixed monthly subscription, Azaleos provides professional services organizations the peace of mind that comes with knowing that their infrastructure is being proactively managed by experts and e-mail data is safely behind their own firewall.”

Azaleos Managed Services

Azaleos Managed Services provide the most complete and reliable set of remotely managed services for Exchange, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Blackberry Enterprise Server, and Active Directory. The Azaleos services model allows customers to keep hardware and data secure on their corporate premise, while outsourcing the monitoring and management headaches and costs. In addition to the core monitoring and management of Exchange Server, the Azaleos services include:
Managed Mobile Services, turnkey management and monitoring for the Blackberry Enterprise Server
Managed Filtering Services, cloud-based anti-virus/anti-spam service and image & content control service
Managed Continuity Services, business continuity and/or dual-site disaster recovery services for both dial tone and mail storage restoration
Managed Archiving, automatic e-mail archiving and storage for Exchange server
Azaleos Active Directory Services, remote monitoring and management of Active Directory
Azaleos SharePoint Services, 24X7 management of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) and its associated infrastructure

About Azaleos

Azaleos Corporation provides the benefits of hosted e-mail and collaboration services for organizations that can’t or won’t allow their data to reside outside the datacenter. Azaleos’ 24X7 remotely managed services for Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, Active Directory, Office Communications Server, and BlackBerry Enterprise Server keep information on-premise and under IT control, while uptime, maintenance, and support is handled by experts in its network operations centers . More than 150 companies from Fortune 500 to mid-market enterprises rely on Azaleos and its patented ViewX technology to manage their collaboration infrastructures and address issues before users ever know they exist. Azaleos is a Microsoft Gold Certified partner, and one of Microsoft’s top 35 partners in the US. For more information visit www.azaleos.com.

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Contacts

Marc Gendron PR
Marc Gendron, 781-237-0341
marc {at} mgpr(.)net