South African Post Office gets more mail with Microsoft

The South African Post Office (SAPO) is reaping the rewards of a full-scale IT upgrade. The improved sophistication of its Microsoft Exchange mail system has seen the delivery time of e-mails speed up from an average of four hours, to mere minutes.

The deployment, which was co-ordinated through Business Connection, saw seven regions and eight main sites upgraded, constituting a total of approximately 3 000 clients nationally. In addition to changing the entire mailing system, the operating platform was upgraded to Microsoft NT Server 4.0, resulting in increased network performance. By choosing a single-vendor deployment approach combined with standardisation on the Microsoft technology platform, SAPO has seen the benefit of lower total cost of ownership.

"What was initially a Y2K upgrade has provided dramatic business and technology benefits which weren`t originally anticipated," says Sonja Kruger, team leader for technical support at SAPO. "We required a state-of-the-art enterprise messaging and collaboration system and Microsoft Exchange has delivered on this. We are now able to easily share files across our network as well as perform group scheduling. This has lead to an improvement in cross-company knowledge sharing and management, since departments are able to communicate easily with each other in real-time."

In addition to the collaboration benefits, SAPO has seen paper cost-savings as a result of e-mail replacing its faxing method of communication. Using Microsoft software to complete the upgrade from the existing Microsoft Mail system, made the transition relatively painless. Microsoft Systems Management Server was used to deploy Outlook 98 across the sites and based on the effective deployment capability of the software, the only information which needed to be migrated across was the mailbox names - making the process easier to manage for Business Connection.

Following the upgrade from the previous version of the product, the national deployment of Microsoft Systems Management Server 2.0 was used to create a hardware and software inventory for the Y2K upgrade. It is currently being used to create a hardware requirement database, since SAPO is looking at a Windows 2000 as a potential upgrade.

"Ever-improving customer service is a continuous drive for us and we have turned to technology to become more streamlined," said Twiggs Xiphu, general manager for information technology at SAPO. "With the reporting functions in Microsoft Exchange and Systems Management Server, we are proactively able to plan and budget for our IT needs as they change."

"We have a close business partnership with Business Connection and this enterprise-level project has utilised the skills which it has acquired on the Microsoft platform and technology framework," says Mncedisi Mayekiso, partner development manager at Microsoft South Africa. "Customer service is as important to us as it is to our customers like SAPO, therefore we work with our partners to deliver the right level of consultancy required."

Business Connection`s use of the Microsoft Solutions Framework, a methodology and model for achieving maximum business value, was an important consideration for SAPO. "Our utilisation of the Microsoft Solutions Framework provides a measureable level of consultancy for our customers," says Dennis Klimashev, national practice manager at Business Connection. "By utilising the structured guidelines for the deployment, risks, goals and milestones, the success of the project could be kept on track and SAPO be continuously informed of progress."