Baltimore City Public Schools Goes Exchange Hybrid with Eyes Wide Open
Aliso Viejo, CA (PRWEB) February 19, 2015 -- Microsoft Exchange monitoring and reporting solution leader ENow announced that Baltimore City Public Schools (BCPSS) has selected their award-winning Mailscape365 tool for Exchange Online reporting and management.
BCPSS serves nearly 85,000 students attending 188 schools and chartered learning programs. As the 3rd largest public school system in the state of Maryland, it employs more than 11,000 teachers and staff in key support and management roles.
Due to the growing dependence on email correspondence within school curriculums, BCPSS needed to ensure every student and staff member had an email account. According to BCPSS System Administrator Maryanne Zahn, Office 365 would eventually complement the on-premises mail, and when fully rolled out, would support more than 40,000 mailboxes. This required an updated and transparent means to monitor and report on the messaging activity, storage and service performance. Overall, BCPSS required deeper visibility into their Cloud Hybrid deployment.
Mailscape365 provides real-time monitoring and reporting capabilities for Exchange Online, Hybrid Exchange deployments. Monitoring and insight into critical components like AD FS, Directory Synchronization and AAD Synchronization was key. For this reason, Mailscape365 serves as the supervisory hub for BCPSS’ messaging platform.
BCPSS was able to maintain visibility of the on-premises environment as well as their Exchange Online environment with the Mailscape365 “one-dashboard” view for their hybrid deployment. Mailscape365’s real-time, centralized capabilities supported BCPSS’ objective “to stay proactive with issues and take care of them before they became bigger problems.”
Additionally, BCPSS noted several infrastructure and configuration challenges regarding architecture integration points and various network devices such as load balancers, DNS, and ports. “The transition from on-premise to hybrid is not a trivial task,” Zahn said. Before active administration could begin, BCPSS needed clarity regarding the size and location of the data going up to the cloud. ENow was instrumental in helping BCPSS maneuver the complex aspects of configuration and accelerated the successful launch of the hybrid deployment. “It would have cost us a lot of effort to try and do that on our own,” Zahn added.
According to Zahn, the key to success is Mailscape365’s central dashboard. It not only provides high level indicators of Office 365’s general status, but offers immediate feedback and critical alerts which allowed their IT team preparation “for upcoming issues as well as time to quickly react to something that’s happened.”
Since installing Mailscape365, Zahn noted several improvements in continuous monitoring and reporting. BCPSS now tracks and reports upon several key indicators for on-premise and cloud-based from a single reporting point. This includes acceptable and potentially-abused usage, traffic patterns for resource deployment, storage capacities for planning, and policy enforcement.
Mailscape is part of the ENow Management System that is utilized in over 60 countries around the world by customers such as Facebook, DirecTV, and Wendy’s. Mailscape’s sleek one-look dashboard makes it easy for you to monitor your environment’s vital components with a quick glance. Mailscape's advanced reporting provides both the real-time and historical trending data you need to optimize system performance and to plan for the future.
About ENow
ENow is a Microsoft Silver ISV focused on helping organizations implement the latest Microsoft technologies and building software tools that simplify the job of IT administrators. Built and founded by Exchange engineers, ENow has developed a series of comprehensive monitoring and reporting solutions and services to help organizations better manage Microsoft technologies. It is currently ranked #1641 on Inc Magazine’s list 5000 fastest growing private companies. Since 2004, ENow has created simplified-yet-comprehensive enterprise monitoring and reporting solutions allowing companies to move from rear-view mirror response to proactive management of its Microsoft infrastructure. This includes Exchange, Active Directory, SharePoint and Lync. Visit ENow at http://www.enowsoftware.com.
Joel Brda, ENow Inc., http://www.enowsoftware.com, +1 951-268-7017, [email protected]
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