How the pharmaceuticals company is using Microsoft's technology to enable it to work more effectively in distributed environments

Growing Pharmaceuticals Company Brings Distributed Business Closer Together 
Posted: 12/14/2005

“When communicating over a document, users can instantly see if the person is at their desk without having to phone or wait for a reply. This is the way forward in the development of our business needs.”Ian Wills, IT Officer, Cambridge Laboratories

Business Needs

Cambridge vision is to become a leading provider of specialist pharmaceuticals for secondary care physicians. The company needed to reduce the duplication of work that resulted from files held on a shared drive being downloaded to multiple individual hard drives and then replaced—a process that often meant that changes were lost. The company’s storage requirements had also been growing rapidly, much of this was thought to be the result of multiple versions of the same file being e-mailed around the business. The number of servers has grown from two to 12 in three years.

Solution

Working with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner SX3, Cambridge Laboratories is using Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005, coupled with Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 (both are part of Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software) to enable it to work more effectively in distributed environments. The working relationship began with an installation of the Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 communication and collaboration server before moving to the more granular communications services. The process has taken five months. The solution helps the company increase the amount of work it does with the United States by creating a fully auditable communications trail to achieve regulatory compliance, while at the same time, reducing the annual growth of storage demands.

Benefits

    * Able to see who is online when accelerating communications across the business
    * Significant savings in storage on the servers
    * Secured communication ensures Cambridge Laboratories’ intellectual property is preserved
    * Compliance is improved because of the logging of instant messenger conversations
    * Reduce the pain barrier when growing from a small to a large company by improving direct communications
    * Individuals can now participate in live conversations about a document to ensure maximum business benefits

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