Shepherd Construction is an industry-leading construction company that carries out projects in both the public and private sectors. With over 100 years of experience in the industry, and a turnover approaching £400 million, Shepherd has a solid reputation for completing projects on time, within budget and to a high standard of quality.

Originally formed in 1890 by Frederick Shepherd, the firm was incorporated as a private company in 1924 and by the late 1930s had established a major presence throughout Yorkshire and North East England.

Growth through innovation by successive generations of the Shepherd family, by acquisition and through geographical expansion, led to the formation of Shepherd Building Group in 1962, which now comprises three divisions – Construction, Manufacturing and Property. Today Shepherd is one of the largest family-owned, private companies in the UK. The turnover of the group as a whole exceeds £600 million.

The traditional construction business is the biggest part of the group, with approximately 1000 employees working in six divisional offices around the country and the head office in York. As the company has grown and developed, IT has become more important to day-to-day operations. With staff working all over the UK on a wide variety of projects, good communications are vital and, like many organisations, Shepherd has grown to become increasingly reliant on its email systems.

Getting the job done
While it is an innovator within its own industry, Shepherd is a company that does not necessarily need the very latest and ground-breaking computer systems – it prefers instead to use solutions that will get the job done simple and effectively. The company had been running Microsoft Windows NT4 Server operating system and Microsoft Exchange 5.5 for some time when it heard about Microsoft’s decision to end support for these systems at the end of 2004.

Like many other customers at the time, Shepherd was compelled to move up to the next version of the software. It also decided that this would be a good opportunity to upgrade its server and storage infrastructure.

“Our philosophy is very much one of ‘if it’s not broke, why fix it’ with regards to IT”, explains Steve Slater, ICT Support Manager at Shepherd Construction. “We do not like to experiment with software – we like the problems to be sorted out first and in any case, there was no business need to move up before that time.”

Even so, it was clear that stepping up to Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft Exchange 2003 would deliver some benefits for the company. But while Shepherd’s own IT staff had implemented and supported the earlier solutions, Slater and his colleagues felt that they would need someone with in-depth expertise in Microsoft solutions and in particular in configuring the Active Directory within Windows 2003, to manage the upgrade and the migration.

“There are a number of reasons why Active Directory is useful and we really needed it to run Exchange 2003 effectively”, Slater explains. “It makes the solution really fit together and it was a natural evolution for us. We had problems before with distributed mail and with server replication and the Active Directory has sorted out all of those issues.”

Understanding and educating
The company looked at a number of possible suppliers before selecting Servo, a Microsoft Gold Partner, to work on the project. “We weren’t very prescriptive about what we wanted”, says Slater. “We knew that we wanted a stable system but we also wanted them to feed in their expertise and give us advice about our scenario.”

It wasn’t just Servo’s Microsoft partner status that made an impression on Shepherd. “That was good but the other contenders had that as well. The main thing was that Servo had good references. They had already partnered with other firms in construction, showed a good understanding of what we needed to do, and had good technical capability as well. They understood our needs and the best way to achieve them.”

Servo was involved with the project early on in 2004 so there was plenty of time to get the upgrade properly planned and in place, and to supply and configure new servers and storage area network systems, which were also provided by Servo.

Slater and his team worked closely with Servo’s technical people to schedule and implement the software and Servo also provided some useful hands-on tuition for Shepherd staff. While everyone received formal training, Servo was able to transfer knowledge to Shepherd’s staff including additional tips that would help them make the most of the new investment.

Since the implementation of the new software, Servo has continued to provide advice and support when required and organised regular ‘tech days’ on which a Microsoft-accredited Servo expert will come on-site to iron out any problems or issues that have arisen with the systems.

Synchronised messaging
The main operational benefit of moving up to Windows 2003 and Exchange 2003 is that all messaging can now be managed and controlled from the York office. Previously, Shepherd had run distributed mail servers in each office, with a central Exchange Server providing the synchronisaton. However, with the Active Directory and the client program for Exchange 2003 in place, Shepherd was able to completely change the way its messaging worked. “Outlook 2003 downloads emails to cache on the desktop so accessing them is much faster and as that’s all done in the background, the process is invisible to the user,” Slater explains.

This has had a positive impact on productivity as local response times have been improved. In addition, the centrally-stored repository of messages can be more effectively monitored, controlled and backed-up. On the previous system, with numerous mail servers in operation, synchronising the mail system was difficult and time-consuming and there was always the danger that files might be lost if they had not been transferred to the centralserver prior to a system failure.

As well as providing all the expertise and support required for Shepherd to make a successful transition to the 2003 editions of Windows and Exchange, Servo recommended the use of Zantaz Enterprise Archive Solution (EAS) for Microsoft Exchange to address some of the issues that had developed with mailbox sizes and message retention.

Shepherd had found it necessary to limit mailbox sizes for users working on the distributed servers as they would take up too much space on the local hard disk and make the process of uploading and synchronising mails much more long-winded. By using EAS with the new version of Exchange, Shepherd would be able to solve these problems.
EAS is a scalable solution that integrates very tightly with Exchange and enables messages to be migrated to secondary storage devices or archives after a set period of time. Implementing EAS ahead of an Exchange upgrade also makes it easier to manage the massive volume of emails already stored in repositories, making the entire process much simpler and quicker.

Additional benefits
The upgrade to Windows and Exchange 2003 has brought a number of significant benefits to Shepherd Construction. As well as the improved control and management capabilities, and better performance, the company has been able to extend the reach of email to remote users. The ‘push’ email capabilities of Exchange 2003 have enabled Shepherd to equip some of its more mobile workers with Windows-compatible Orange SPV C600 smartphones, so that they can receive and send emails while they are out on-site, travelling or attending meetings.

“We have been able to deliver mobile email and lift the limits on mailbox sizes and all messages are now archived after 60 days. On the distributed system this would have been very hard to do and users would become frustrated as, once they reached their limit, they could not send or receive emails”, Slater explains.

As well as giving Shepherd more control, the combination of the central mail server and EAS has helped to boost performance. Shepherd’s workers all over the UK are regularly exchanging large drawing files, which they send as emails attachments; if these are stored locally they take up a considerable amount of disk space. The central storing and automatic archiving of these files frees up space on local systems and thus enhances system performance. The background downloads that are managed by Exchange 2003 and the Outlook 2003 client means that no time is wasted waiting for files to be transferred on request. In addition, Shepherd’s IT team can make sure that the centrally-stored files are backed up on a regular basis.

One further benefit is that systems are more stable now. With the heavy burden placed on them by the volume of stored messages and large file sizes, local servers would crash quite often – downtime of this nature is very rare now.

The right attitude
Servo’s contribution to the project, which took almost 12 months to complete, has been very significant, says Slater. “All in all, it was as good an experience as we could have expected and I’ve been pretty impressed with what Servo have done. They have been very professional and very prompt – they do things when they say they are going to do them. Their communications are very good – we’ve had a lot of contact with our account manager – and their technical capability is excellent.”

This was, after all, he notes, one of the reasons Shepherd chose to work with Servo in the first place, and it proved to be a good decision. “We were convinced that they had the right skills and understood our needs.”

In Servo, he concludes, Shepherd Construction found a supplier that was able to match its own high standards. “It is important to us that our suppliers don’t let us down because we need to be totally focused on our customers and we need to make sure that all our suppliers have that same attitude and approach – in the end that’s what your reputation depends on.”

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