January 4, 2011, Toronto, Canada – Messageware (http://www.messageware.com) today announced that Saddle Brook, NJ-based Clarity Imaging Technologies, Inc. (http://www.clarityimaging.com), has selected and implemented the Messageware OWA Suite to assure the smooth deployment of Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Office Outlook Web Access (OWA) companywide.
About half of Clarity Imaging’s 100 employees are field technicians who are constantly on the road serving corporate clients. Most of these technicians, prior to 2009, used Blackberry devices for their routine email contact. When the company chose to migrate to Microsoft Exchange 2007 that year as its new email platform, it standardized on OWA for all employee accounts—field workers included.
“Blackberries have a limited user interface and most field technicians need their laptops for service needs anyway,” stated David Rodman, Director of IT for Clarity Imaging. “Trouble is, if a laptop loaded with traditional Microsoft Outlook fails, the user’s email goes with it. Moving to web-based OWA solved the problem.”
According to Rodman, one major concern was preventing Clarity Imaging from moving smoothly to OWA: the software’s lack of certain key desktop-Outlook productivity features. “Without calendar sharing and printing, spellcheck, personal dictionaries and attachment viewing, the project was simply going to fall on its face. No one would be happy moving to OWA,” he recalled. “We had to find an answer.”
Rodman’s search for an OWA productivity enhancement solution led him to a blog site that specifically discussed the spellcheck issue. It recommended a unique product to solve the problem—Messageware Plus Pack, part of the company’s OWA software suite. “Plus Pack’s key features—spellcheck, a roaming personal dictionary, and Outlook-style email addressing, to name a few—were what we needed to fill in the limitations of OWA,” he noted.
Before long, Clarity Imaging ordered not only Plus Pack, but several other products that together comprise the OWA Suite: Messageware CalendarShare, enabling users to delegate, view and manage company calendars online; Messageware AttachView, which allows users to securely & quickly view over 400 types of attachments within the email client; and Messageware ActiveSend, which provides one-click “send to:” functionality to OWA with Microsoft Office and other common desktop business applications.
“Our help desk people get a lot of service requests via email, and they have to cut and paste those requests into our ticketing system. Speed is critical for these folks. One day, a help desk specialist asked if there was a way to cut and paste information from within AttachView. Only problem is, AttachView doesn’t allow this—it’s a security product,” stated Rodman. “We took the idea to Messageware anyway. Guess what—they did a custom modification that lets our people cut and paste. Security, in this case, isn’t an issue since the altered product is only accessed internally.”
Using the productivity applications found in OWA Suite, Clarity Imaging was able to not only roll out OWA companywide without an “Outlook mutiny”, but also see a sizeable improvement in help desk efficiency.
“There are no hardcore numbers, but we estimate the modifications to AttachView cut in half the time needed to transfer customer information into our ticketing system,” commented Rodman. “Given that we process 6,000 tickets every month, that’s a lot of time being saved.”
Clarity Imaging looks forward to aggressively expanding its use of ActiveSend and is also seeing increased use of CalendarShare by managers who can now quickly see who’s available for service calls or employee meetings.
“With Messageware we were able to provide our users with the tools they needed, out of the box,” he said. “Our OWA deployment would never have accomplished our goals without them.”
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About Clarity Imaging
Clarity Imaging is a leader in the fight to maximize workplace printing efficiency through advanced toner technology—an improvement that not only lowers costs, but also helps the environment. Its proprietary toner cartridges, which have earned the company nine patents and three patents pending, double the page yield of OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) cartridges while saving users 25 to 35%. Using the company’s products, businesses can do their part to reduce the 120 million tons of annual landfill waste attributed to ink and toner cartridges.
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