Time is money, and when a business can’t manage its time efficiently, the bottom line takes a hit. Schedules and meetings are essential for a business to be organized. But what can a business do when the arrangement of meetings and schedules are inherently disorganized.
For Iron Mountains, a company that produces a variety of baby products, this was a genuine issue.
“We have resource accounts such as conference rooms, etc in Exchange that need to be shared among multiple organizations in the same building. We use CB Exchange Server Sync to keep multiple references to the same resource in sync among multiple domains. This helps users from different organizations to avoid duplicate bookings and see accurate availability”, says Alan Stone, Director of Information Technology, Iron Mountains.
Fortunately, Connecting Software, a company that provides integration, synchronization and productivity solutions, came to the rescue.
According to the case study on Connecting Software’s website, CB Exchange Server Sync was the solution for secure synchronization and migration of data between Exchange Servers, as it enables easy synchronization of multiple Outlook accounts hosted in Exchange Server or Office 365.
So why did Iron Mountains chosen CB Exchange Server Sync? “It is the only product that I am aware of that does what we need, and does it simply for a reasonable cost. It generally works very well – we have to tweak it every once in a while, but it’s usually very stable,” says Alan Stone, Director of Information Technology, Iron Mountains.
To get a better understanding of the solution, we reached out to Thomas Berndorfer, Founder and CEO of Connecting Software.
1) Do you have any future projects planned with Iron Mountains?
Only the Exchange Server synchronization while they evaluate how our solutions could help to improve their IT environment in future.
2) In the case study, Alan Stone, Director of Information Technology of Iron Mountains, states “It is the only product that I am aware of that does what we need.” Can you explain what sets Connecting Software apart from competitors in the market?
Specifically, the synchronization of calendars between different servers or Office365 domains and the way we do it is unique on the market.
Also, we cover all entities: calendar, tasks, contacts, emails, etc. Many others do not, we can work in the same way with all Exchange Server versions from 2010 to today. We are working cross-domain, on-pre, , cloud and hybrid. We have a cheap SaaS version for smaller customers from 5 dollars per month, up to server-based solutions for thousands of users. We can even censor content for e.g. external users in high secure environments like finance, research, and government.
3) Regarding the solution used, what was the main motivator to initially solve this problem for businesses, for example, did it arise from a personal experience or something you recognized others having issues with?
We are specialists in Connecting software – so when we started to build our platform we started with Exchange Server: in 2008 Exchange Server was a kind of monolith and no one was offering integration with the Exchange Server; only via Outlook. This is hard work for all companies as you have to support each client. With a server-based solution, you can save huge time and effort.
So, our original drive to make the integration was to build a bridge between Exchange/Outlook the major communication tool in business with all other applications. In those days the interfaces were much more complicated and therefore we had nearly no competitors. Ironically the market did not believe that we can cover this long-term problem — only after publishing some other connectors we gained the trust from the market.
4) Do you have any other exciting projects on the horizon that you can share with us?
Currently we have 2 big new items:
Integrations between industry and business software in the exact the same way. Today these two worlds are more or less separated and siloed. Over the last 2-3 years, they’ve started to open their doors to more friendly and easier integration. But all sides only offer a view from their perspective, so the other side always needs to learn the new point of view. In technical terms, this is pretty difficult.
So, they make projects with bigger teams from both sides, which requires a lot of money and communication. We are the first ones who can talk in the same way to a robot or a machine as to a SharePoint, a Salesforce org or a Dynamics365 application. All in a way all sides understand and can work with within one day. This can revolutionize the interaction between industry and business software.
Disclosure: This article includes a client of an Espacio portfolio company
