JTC Group uses Ideagen Mail Manager to drive scalability and growth

The challenge

Rapid growth meant change was needed

As a well-established company with a 30-year history, JTC Group was relying on Microsoft’s public folders for data storage. The public folders worked well in the company’s early days when JTC Group had fewer than 20 employees; however, rapid and sustained growth meant a more versatile, scalable enterprise storage solution was needed to keep up with the dynamic pace of the organisation.

Nigel Carruthers, associate director, group information systems, JTC Group said, “The public folders required a lot of management from our staff and the IT team. We needed better access to three terabytes of client data that had been stored in the public folders over the past 30 years. We also needed a more secure solution that could scale as our business continued to grow.

The solution

Integrating a single solution that matched the company’s needs

To accommodate continued business growth, JTC Group required a secure, scalable document storage solution that would keep up with the dynamic nature of the company.

The solution needed to be a natural fit for JTC Group employees and clients for a seamless transition to the new platform. It also needed advanced search capabilities.

Nigel Carruthers said, “We didn’t want an off-the-shelf product that we couldn’t do anything with. At JTC Group, we like to customise our IT solutions so that we can build our processes, such as automation, around them.”

Ideagen Mail Manager offered JTC Group a secure, integrated and easily customisable solution that provided smart filing of emails, drag-and-drop functionality for Microsoft Office 365 and SharePoint, the ability to automatically save and easily share documents, and advanced document search capabilities.

It had the added advantage of connecting Microsoft Outlook to SharePoint so that users could save emails and attachments directly into SharePoint with the touch of a button. Instead of users having to toggle between the two applications, Ideagen Mail Manager lets users complete their work in SharePoint without ever leaving the Outlook screen.

Nigel Carruthers said, “We had a look at Ideagen Mail Manager about 10 years ago; however, JTC Group was not in the right place at that time to make the break from public folders. When it came time to look at a scalable solution, Ideagen Mail Manager was always in the back of our minds.”

The adaptability of Ideagen Mail Manager meant that minimal staff training was required. JTC Group employees were already comfortable with SharePoint’s drag-and-drop capabilities, and the organisation was able to customise components to maintain familiarity for staff and clients so that the change was an evolution, not a revolution.

The results

Ideagen Mail Manager delivers security, automation and scalability

JTC Group now has eight terabytes of data stored with Ideagen Mail Manager. The company has successfully integrated the solution with its Viewpoint file sharing application so that, if changes are made to client data in Viewpoint, it automatically sends the update to the client via Microsoft Outlook, further improving client service.

The Ideagen Mail Manager search functionality has also reduced the time it takes for JTC Group employees to search for historical client information. This process could take up to a week before Ideagen Mail Manager was implemented and is now down to around five minutes. The solution’s security component ensures that only authorised users can view and access data.

Nigel Carruthers said, “The transition to Ideagen Mail Manager has been a real success story for JTC Group from the technology specialists involved, importation tools, inhouse development for back-end triggers, automation and efficiencies through to training people and using the system.

“The benefits have been brilliant from a versatility and scalability perspective, and we have gained efficiencies everywhere. The product’s scalability also provides a solid platform for future growth as we grow our business through acquisitions. Ideagen Mail Manager helps to make the integrations more efficient by easily folding the data into the already-established environment.

“Ideagen Mail Manager is a product we can now just leave alone. We know it’s going to work and it helps future-proof our business. We have moved forward technologically so we can now move on to other activities that will continue to drive business growth.”