Our client, a professional services firm, was paying over $4,000 a month for a 6 Mbps link between its San Francisco and Los Angeles offices, but the connection was unreliable and never exceeded 2 Mbps. Two years of trouble tickets failed to resolve the problem. In fact, the telecom vendor insisted everything was testing correctly on its end.
The professional services firm asked Xantrion to look into the problem. Consultant Christian Kelly discovered that the vendor had misconfigured their network equipment at installation.
Armed with this proof, the client was able to negotiate a full reimbursement of the roughly $130,000 they had paid for the faulty connection, as well as exit the contract early without penalty. Xantrion helped secure a new contract with the service provider which greatly increased the speed of the link at a lower monthly cost.
The moral of the story? Xantrion wants to be sure our clients get what they pay for -- and not just from us.
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Monday, April 25, 2011
Xantrion Consultant Solves A Problem Microsoft Couldn't
Our Senior Consultant Ben Ludwig knows Microsoft Exchange better than anyone else at Xantrion. Now he can brag that he knows it better than most of Microsoft's own engineers -- because last month, Ludwig found a solution to a tricky Exchange migration issue that even Microsoft had only been able to solve once before.
One of our clients wanted to upgrade its email system and needed to complete the migration with as little downtime as possible. Since the client was still using Exchange 2003, Ludwig had to help them leapfrog over Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010. That brought up a known issue. Other users migrating directly from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 had reported that they could use Outlook Web Access to retrieve email from any browser, or they could use ActiveSync to access their email, calendars, and contacts from a smartphone, but they couldn't do both at once.
"I knew it was going to be a problem, but I had to make it work," Ludwig says.
A typical Exchange migration project takes 40 hours. This one took 150, many of them on the phone with a senior Exchange specialist at Microsoft. But in the end, Ludwig found a way to give our client both webmail and mobile email.
Microsoft's pro told Ludwig it was only the second time anyone had been able to solve this particular problem. But it's certainly not the last time. Ludwig has documented the entire process in detail so other Xantrion consultants can duplicate it.
One of our clients wanted to upgrade its email system and needed to complete the migration with as little downtime as possible. Since the client was still using Exchange 2003, Ludwig had to help them leapfrog over Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010. That brought up a known issue. Other users migrating directly from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 had reported that they could use Outlook Web Access to retrieve email from any browser, or they could use ActiveSync to access their email, calendars, and contacts from a smartphone, but they couldn't do both at once.
"I knew it was going to be a problem, but I had to make it work," Ludwig says.
A typical Exchange migration project takes 40 hours. This one took 150, many of them on the phone with a senior Exchange specialist at Microsoft. But in the end, Ludwig found a way to give our client both webmail and mobile email.
Microsoft's pro told Ludwig it was only the second time anyone had been able to solve this particular problem. But it's certainly not the last time. Ludwig has documented the entire process in detail so other Xantrion consultants can duplicate it.
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