Houghton Mifflin: Gets Proactive and Reduces Costs Using BoxTone
The Company
Boston-based Houghton Mifflin Company is one of the leading educational publishers in the United States, with more than $1.4 billion in sales. The Company publishes a comprehensive set of educational solutions, ranging from research-based textbook programs to instructional technology to standards-based assessments for elementary and secondary schools and colleges.
The Challenge
Houghton Mifflin supplies more than 850 BlackBerry smartphones to its sales force, executives, and IT group. The BlackBerry network includes 2 BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) for Microsoft Exchange and 1 BlackBerry Enterprise Server for IBM Lotus Domino connected to 8 email servers and two carriers (AT&T and T-Mobile).
Until recently, Houghton Mifflin's messaging technologies IT team monitored the health of its BlackBerry network by launching echo emails every one half hour; if the team didn't receive the message on their own BlackBerry smartphones they would know to check for problems. However as Chip Brady, manager of Messaging Technologies, Corporate IT at Houghton Mifflin says, "The system was kludged together. It wasn't very effective or proactive."
If this rudimentary monitoring system did uncover a problem, the group had no way to determine precisely what was causing it -- whether it was the BlackBerry smartphone, the carrier, the BES or the mail server. It also meant that it took a long time to solve problems and made it difficult to prevent them.
The Choice: BoxTone for BlackBerry
Houghton Mifflin selected BoxTone® for BlackBerry management and monitoring software. Says Brady, "At the time we selected BoxTone, other solutions were available that could manage individual mail servers and network operation centers (NOCs). But we wanted a comprehensive solution that could proactively monitor the entire BlackBerry environment from smartphone to carrier to BES to mail server. BoxTone was the only solution that allowed us to monitor what was going on with all those systems from a single GUI."
Results
BoxTone has succeeded in addressing all of Houghton Mifflin's requirements. Says Brady, "If there's a problem, we know ahead of the users and can notify them. In the best case, we can fix problems before anyone is impacted; at worst, users know we're on top of the issue."
The Corporate IT group can now better track BlackBerry issues for individual users. When a problem occurs with an individual smartphone, the BoxTone platform can tell the service desk the specific smartphone and configuration in question -- rather than having to rely on users to provide that information or send in their smartphone. IT can also track activity on the smartphone remotely.
In addition to faster, more proactive troubleshooting, BoxTone has provided Houghton Mifflin with significant asset management capabilities, to great effect. For example, once deployed, BoxTone's auto-discovery capabilities enabled the IT group to quickly discover that a number of smartphones on the BlackBerry server had been terminated. "BoxTone showed the problem so we were able to eliminate that overhead and recover our assets," says Brady.
By using BoxTone, Houghton Mifflin has been able to more proactively manage both the entire system and individual users to provide the best possible service to the business.
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