We all know the story. You get the direct mail ad from your local fast food joint with an impossibly luscious hamburger pictured above a discount offer. Coupon in hand and salivary glands in overdrive, you succumb to temptation — only to find upon unwrapping your guilty pleasure that…you guessed it…the burger bears little resemblance to the picture.
Little wonder, then, that one of the quickest ways to turn consumers into evangelists is to present them with a reality that exceeds whatever aural or visual bait you hooked them with.
Which goes a long way in explaining my delight in a recent conversation I had with Jeremy Boscacci, the network manager for New Trier High School District, located just 20 miles north of Chicago. Jeremy, who just became a new dad a few weeks ago (hence the photo of a baby rather than a burger), and whose wife
was actually in labor at the time of my conversation with him, also has the distinction of being the first customer for MPC’s enhanced version of MailFRAME — the enhancement being MailFRAME’s support of Exchange 2007 and iSCSI SAN.
In the case of New Trier High School District’s experience with MailFRAME, one can only say that the burger most definitely looked like the picture! So much so that during the course of our conversation I couldn’t help but imagine that one of our product marketing folks had slipped Jeremy a content brief in advance of my call. Right down the line, from the factors that compelled New Trier’s IT department to search for an e-mail archival solution to the actual deployment of the appliance, Jeremy’s experience uncannily mirrored MPC’s marketing claims.
By way of background, Jeremy’s IT department serves six surrounding schools with a combined faculty and staff of 800, in addition to 4,300 students. Those of you who have read any of MPC’s white papers on the regulatory and compliance issues driving the adoption of e-mail archival solutions in education will appreciate the concerns of Jeremy’s district superintendent, and his subsequent imperative to find and deploy a technology that would address the implications of the updated Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to potential litigation involving the district. In short, said Jeremy, “We needed to make e-mail archival a priority.”
Jeremy’s subsequent search for an e-mail solution also mirrored MPC’s positioning of the MailFRAME appliance vis-a-vis software and service approaches. Jeremy looked at software solutions, but rejected these on the basis of expense as well as his aversion to loading software on the IT department’s Exchange server. Given the amount of e-mail to be archived, the option of using a hosted service presented routing problems. After attending a webinar on MailFRAME, Boscacci decided that an appliance-based solution not only avoided the pitfalls of the other options he had considered, but also won out on another important criterion: cost. “A 5,000 seat license came out to mere dollars per seat.”
in developing mid-market IT solutions, one of MPC’s sustainability goals is ease of deployment and maintence. In the case of MailFRAME, Jeremy described it as “one of the simplest appliances we’ve installed,” adding that “we pulled it out of the box, made the configuration changes, and were up an running in two hours.”
In comparing the burger to the picture, Jeremy’s closing comments in our discussion resonated most loudly with regard to how MPC has promoted MailFRAME as the right solution for e-mail archival in the education market: “We’re covered from all legal standpoints, the appliance can work on any platform in the school district, and the playback functionality is tremendous. MailFRAME proves that e-mail archival doesn’t have to difficult or costly to be reliable.”
Bon appetit.
Oh…as for the picture of Jeremy’s new baby, all I can say is that based on Noah’s older brother Luke, the burger must definintely have lived up to mom’s and dad’s expectations! Congrats, Jeremy…and thanks for being an MPC customer.
mpcperiscope.wordpress.com 