Real World Solutions from People in the Trenches Featuring Messageware and Calgary Health Region

By Messaging News staff
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Alberta Health Services’ Calgary Health Region (AHS-CHR) is one of the largest healthcare service areas in Canada. Calgary Region specific IT resources support over 29,000 AHS-CHR employees and 2,300 physicians spread across 100 diverse facilities (including 12 hospitals, 41 care centers and a number of community/continuing care sites). The Calgary Health Region had previously offered their employees separate solutions for email and calendaring, each in both desktop client and Web-based versions. When the vendor discontinued one of these solutions, the Region saw an opportunity to revisit the messaging strategy, and sought solutions that would best serve its diverse workforce (both for the short and long terms). Requirements central to a successful solution included:

  • Ability to ensure consistency and availability regardless of access location or time
  • Ability to provide integrated email and calendar features that fostered productive work among colleagues across all Region sites
  • Movement from desktop to browser-based email that enabled capitalization on the associated benefits (including cost reductions)

The Region’s choice messaging platform was Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. “We chose Microsoft Exchange 2007 and Outlook Web Access (OWA) because it helps us better integrate with the millions of users around the world that are also using Exchange”, says Chief Information Officer Maria Eisenberg. “Using OWA also fits perfectly with our strategic vision of reduced software on the desktop, and thus, simplified management of upgrades and administration.”

Before deploying Outlook Web Access, the Region required the addition of essential functionality to satisfy the requirements of management and staff. Messageware, a provider of enterprise productivity and security solutions for Microsoft Office Outlook Web Access, provided this functionality. “We knew we didn’t want to use a full desktop client. Messageware’s years of experience developing OWA-specific solutions and their large customer base gave us the confidence to use their products and development expertise to add the functionality and security we needed to deploy OWA,” explains Eisenberg. Messageware enhancements have seen messaging tasks that had previously taken minutes to accomplish, now take only seconds.

Published January 22, 2009