About the customer
Hannah is a Czech brand specializing in the production of outdoor and sports clothing and equipment, with a tradition dating back to 1991. The company’s product portfolio includes ski and outdoor clothing, tents, sleeping bags, backpacks, footwear, and other accessories. Today, the company sells its products in more than 20 countries around the world and operates its own network of branded stores in the Czech Republic.
Challenges
Thanks to its distributed structure, the company addresses its communication needs both at its headquarters and at its branches. Hannah primarily operates telephone communication through the Kerio Operator solution and, above all, email communication with email archiving capabilities, both for internal communication and for communication with customers, including e-shop operators. Half of the employees at the headquarters also use email on mobile devices. More than 1,600 emails pass through the company every day.
Previously, the company operated its email communication using a Microsoft Exchange mail server and was deciding between it and the Kerio Connect solution. Kerio was clearly selected based on the price-to-value ratio.
Solution
The company ultimately deployed Kerio Connect, a messaging and collaboration solution that meets the needs of small and medium-sized businesses and offers a wide range of features. It allows users to use a variety of popular email clients and also provides easy access to mail through an intuitive web interface. Within the Kerio Connect solution, Hannah uses mail server functionality and also runs the Kerio Connect Client mail client at its branches.
At headquarters, users use the Microsoft Outlook client application with the Kerio Plugin add-on to synchronize offline content. The Kerio solution also provides a mobile application for employees working in the field and while traveling. The solution also enables access to email through a web portal, which serves in the company as a backup in the event of an outage of the client application.
Within the solution, the administrators of Outdoor Concept, which operates as an IT service organization for Hannah and Rock Point, actively use anti-spam and antivirus protection. Kerio Connect enables its management, including the manual addition or removal of exceptions in the spam filter to minimize false positives. The functionality for managing users’ mailbox sizes, mail forwarding, and mail archiving is also used.
Benefits
In practice, Kerio Connect has proven to be a simple and easily configurable application with low acquisition and operating costs. Thanks to the use of Kerio Connect Client, the company did not have to purchase Microsoft Outlook licenses for its branches, resulting in significant cost savings. A major advantage is easy management for users, who can quickly, simply, and intuitively configure the necessary parameters and then fully focus on their core work activities.
Kerio Connect is also very simple and efficient from the solution administration perspective, and IT staff appreciate its performance, which allows one administrator to manage the mail infrastructure for 180 users. All administration can be carried out through a web browser, remotely or while working from home, from both PCs and mobile devices. It provides immediate information about suspicious email traffic and thus helps prevent risky situations.
“Kerio Connect primarily serves us as a simple, intuitive tool for deploying and setting up clients at branches, including all possible user settings. What I consider most important is seamless integration with the domain; domain accounts are imported automatically. These solution features, combined with trouble-free operation, make it possible for essentially one person to manage the complete email infrastructure.”
Václav Šimkanin, IT Technician, Outdoor Concept, a.s.
Article author: ZEBR.ai editorial team
