Pelican Healthcare, based in Cardiff, is a specialist manufacturer of disposable medical products for the UK and Ireland healthcare market.

The company was operating an uncommon MDaemon email system but was looking to switch to Microsoft Exchange.

“We wanted to move from MDaemon to take advantage of the benefits of Exchange – without the headache of doing it ourselves,” reveals Pelican’s IT Manager Stephen Charitos. “After factoring in all the variables such as the cost of new servers, implementation and backup – it seemed it would take us a lot of time, money and effort without any significant gains in doing so.”

The company looked at various cloud providers of Hosted Exchange and to their surprise found a considerable difference in the quotes they received.

Pelican was already using Databarracks for backup and Virtual Disaster Recovery and had been happy with the support and service they’d been getting. In the end, the combination of Databarracks’ dependability and competitive pricing led them to choose Databarracks for its Hosted Exchange service.

After a consultation process, Databarracks proposed a Dedicated Hosted Exchange solution which would enable the Microsoft Exchange server to be essentially under Pelican’s control and remain part of their infrastructure. It also allows for other applications to be integrated with email in the future.

Migration:
Due to the nature of the MDaemon mail system, Databarracks ran a thorough testing and proof of concept period before migration. Specialist software was employed to configure the MDaemon emails for Microsoft Exchange to ensure compatibility.

“It was by no means a straight-forward migration process but Databarracks showed great commitment to getting the job done and were onsite to sort out any technical glitches,” says Charitos.

Benefits:
Pelican Healthcare immediately witnessed the advantages of their new Hosted Exchange email solution.

“Staff members across the board are appreciative of the improved performance of emails,” stresses Charitos. “We’ve found huge benefits in simply the way the email client is released to the user – previously it could take up to 5 to ten minutes for Outlook to start - now it is virtually instant.”

“Also, as IT Manager, it means if we are doing any scheduled downtime, we are not taking down our email server as well,” says Charitos. “Plus, being hosted in the cloud also fits in well with our DR planning - if we were to lose this building, we would still have an email server and everything else that comes with it.”

Unlike with an IMAP email solution such as MDaemon, Microsoft Exchange also allows users to remove all emails from a mobile device at the Exchange end – so it can be wiped in the event that it is lost or stolen - further bolstering company security.

The move from MDaemon to Databarracks’ Hosted Exchange not only put a whole new email system in place but also was the first time that Pelican Healthcare had outsourced an application to a hosting provider:
“All in all, it’s been a very good experience of putting a service in the cloud,” says Charitos.
 

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