The client

Martin’s Properties is a family-owned property investment business based in Chelsea, with over 60 years in the market. As well as a wide range of residential properties, the company owns and manages a diverse portfolio of commercial premises including shops, restaurants, cinemas, medical and office accommodation.

Martin’s Properties has members of staff based in its office plus several consultants who divide their time between office-based and remote work.

ER Information Systems has been providing IT services to Martin’s Properties since 2001. As well as managing the whole IT infrastructure, ERIS advises on IT strategy and contributes to the company’s IT policy.

The challenge

Martin’s Properties uses email to communicate with multiple stakeholders. The company has its own on-premise server and had an anti-spam/anti-virus system hosted on this local server. Email is accessed from Outlook on all workstations in the office. The employees also use Outlook Web App and smartphones to access their messages while offsite.

The high-volume of spam — 5,000 per week on average — used to demand 4 hours of work per month in administration.

The quarantine area was centralised and managed by the outsourced IT team. They would process the spam filter on demand and once per week they would determine which messages to forward to users and which to delete.

As individual users could not manage their own spam filters, they would need to notify the IT team if they were expecting an important email. They would experience delays in receiving their messages, whenever they were mistakenly caught by the anti-spam filter.

All this spam was also consuming resources such as storage space, bandwidth and processor usage. This reduced the effective capacity of their server and slowed down the email service for internal users.

On occasions, the filter would stop working properly and cause either a flood of spam or a interruption in inbound email. This situation would not only disrupt the workflow but also require additional IT management work.

The solution

ER Information Systems suggested that Martin’s Properties change its internally managed email filtering system for a cloud-based one. This solution gave more agility and flexibility to Martin’s Properties’ email service. Each individual user can now administer their own spam filtering directly, a task that takes no more than 2 minutes daily. Through the daily quarantine summary, the users can see which emails are in quarantine and quickly release any messages trapped by mistake. They have total autonomy to edit their whitelists and blacklists. The tool is easy to use and does not require expert knowledge.

The hosted email filtering provided by ER Information Systems is also much more resilient therefore less susceptible to faults than the previous in-house system used by Martin’s Properties. This improved solution dramatically reduces the likelihood of an interruption in the email filtering service.

Martin’s Properties has opted for the complete set of email management services, adding messaging continuity and keyword filtering to its anti-spam/anti-virus system. Messaging continuity gives Martin's Properties time to recover in the event of a fault in its email server. While it is being fixed, the company can access emails through a web portal that stores up to 21 days history. The other additional service contracted, keyword filtering, is a resource which allows blocking, quarantining or simply monitoring emails by keywords defined by the client. This tool allows the company to monitor whether if its computer usage policy is being followed.

The positive outcome

Having each user taking control of their own email account gives not only increased flexibility and efficiency but also saves money previously spent with the IT support team in managing their centralised email filter.

As the new service is no longer based on Martin’s Properties’ own server, all inbound emails are directed to ERIS’ datacentre, where the email filtering service is hosted. The emails are filtered and only the clean traffic is redirected to Martin’s Properties’ server. This measure reduced the volume of inbound messages by 90% and also released resources on Martin’s Properties’ server.

The new service is not only saving Martin's Properties money but also freeing up internal resources. The employees are very satisfied with the change, as it allows them more efficiency in their email communication.

From the client

"Every time we had a new customer, I had to remember to send their email address to the IT team, but it didn’t really work. Sometimes for no reason an email would get stuck, then the customer would call, I would say I didn’t get it, ask IT to release the email, call the customer back. Now it’s much easier."

Armanda Keith, Martin’s Properties