Microsoft Exchange Server 2007
Customer Solution Case Study
Russian Conglomerate Handles Deluge of
Spam While Automating E-Mail Management
Overview
Country or Region: Russia
Industry: Manufacturing—Automotive and
industrial manufacturing
Customer Profile
Based in Samara, Russia, with more than
50,000 employees, SOK Group includes
enterprises in various industrial sectors,
but focuses primarily on automobile
manufacturing and road and bridge
construction.
Business Situation
The company needed a more reliable email infrastructure, one that would improve
remote access, eliminate malicious
software, and let the IT staff develop
custom-tracking applications.
Solution
SOK Group upgraded to Microsoft®
Exchange Server 2007 Enterprise Edition
Service Pack 1 to manage and monitor its
60 e-mail domains located throughout
Russia.
Benefits
 Fewer mundane tasks for IT
 Less downtime
 Less malicious software
 Easier remote access
“The most important feature for us was the antispam
engine in Exchange Server 2007 SP1 because we get
up to 100,000 spam e-mail messages a month.”
Petr Grachev, CIO, SOK Group
One of the largest privately held organizations in Russia, SOK Group
encompasses more than 40 companies. It had a highly complex IT
infrastructure and was using many manual processes to monitor
traffic on its e-mail servers and to deploy new domains. The
company decided to upgrade to Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007
Service Pack 1 (SP1) for its numerous capabilities for automated
monitoring and reporting and for combating malicious software. The
IT staff is now using new features within Exchange Server 2007
SP1 to create customized tools and reports and to extend
protection against spam. Through integration with Microsoft
Operations Manager 2005, the company has reduced calls to its
help desk. With the new solution, the company is enjoying a more
reliable e-mail infrastructure, greater security against malicious
software attacks, and improved management of its server
computers.
“With the Exchange
Management Shell, we
are able to automate a
lot of activities. We can
even deploy a new
domain on a completely
automated basis.”
Petr Grachev, CIO, SOK Group
Situation
Based in Samara, Russia, SOK Group is one
of the largest privately owned companies in
Russia, with more than 50,000 employees
and revenues in 2006 of U.S.$2.95 billion. It
encompasses more than a dozen industrial
enterprises in various sectors of the domestic
economy, but focuses primarily on
automobile manufacturing, automotive
component production, car retailing, and road
and bridge construction. As part of a strategic
plan for growth, SOK Group is increasingly
investing in international joint ventures for
manufacturing and distribution, including a
deal with Kia Motors of South Korea. As a
result, its electronic communications
infrastructure must be highly reliable and
accessible for remote users.
Providing communications capabilities for
such a widespread operation involves a highly
complex e-mail infrastructure, according to
Petr Grachev, Chief Information Officer at
SOK Group. His IT staff is responsible for
overseeing 60 e-mail server domains, each of
which requires reporting mechanisms
regarding its traffic, uptime, and delivery
time, among other metrics. His team was
using Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003, but
it didn’t provide the depth of high-availability
and recovery options needed for their
distributed environment.
The company also faced a daunting
onslaught of potential threats from malicious
software. The 1,200 employees who use email—mostly high-level executives—were
receiving as many as 100,000 unsolicited email messages per month. While SOK Group
had installed Microsoft Forefront™ Security
for Exchange Server, it was also using the
Trend Micro security application as a client
application.
Grachev needed to tackle three facets of the
company’s network: address the complexity
of the company’s e-mail infrastructure;
combat the unsolicited e-mail; and improve
the executives’ ability to access e-mail while
offline.
Solution
In early 2007, SOK Group upgraded to
Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Enterprise
Edition Service Pack 1 (SP1). The IT
department deployed three clusters, with two
nodes in each cluster for reliability. One
cluster serves as an Edge Transport server on
the edge of the network, another cluster acts
as the mail server, and the third cluster
handles client access through Microsoft
Office Outlook® Web Access.
“The most important feature for us was the
antispam engine in Exchange Server 2007,”
Grachev says, “because we get up to
100,000 spam e-mail messages a month.”
He appreciates the enhanced antivirus and
antispam capabilities in Exchange Server
2007 SP1, which include the ability to use a
new feature called Exchange Management
Shell, built on the Windows PowerShell™
command line interface, to create and
manage rules.
Grachev also upgraded to Exchange Server
2007 SP1 because he felt it was better
suited to the extensive infrastructure of SOK
Group and able to cover all of the company's
many business entities. Additionally, SOK
Group had used many manual processes for
keeping track of traffic, uptime, and other
facets of the Exchange Server 2003 server
computers. With Exchange Server 2007, the
IT staff at SOK Group can use the Exchange
Management Shell and associated
command-line plug-ins to automate
previously manual administrative and
processing tasks.
Grachev’s team is also using the Exchange
Server 2007 software development kit (SDK)
to write custom transport agents for
Exchange Server 2007, which provide
“We’re using the
integration between
Microsoft Operations
Manager 2005 and
Exchange Server 2007
SP1 to be more
proactive. We need to
know about mail
delivery problems before
we get a call at the help
desk.”
Petr Grachev, CIO, SOK Group
additional functionality, such as adding
additional antispam logic. SOK Group is
deploying Microsoft Forefront Client Security
on its client computers to replace the Trend
Micro security application and better
integrate with Microsoft Forefront Security for
Exchange Server.
SOK Group has also integrated the Exchange
Server 2007 management tools with
Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 to track
the uptime and availability of the company's
e-mail server computers. “We’re using the
integration between Microsoft Operations
Manager 2005 and Exchange Server 2007
SP1 to be more proactive,” says Grachev.
“We need to know about mail delivery
problems before we get a call at the help
desk.” The increased management
capabilities for Exchange Server have already
decreased such calls, Grachev says.
On the user side, executives report that they
appreciate the new features of Outlook Web
Access. “Our executives use Outlook Web
Access even while in the office because they
tell us it is more convenient for them,” says
Grachev, noting that 70 percent of SOK
Group executives use workstations and 30
percent use portable computers. Laptop
users also take advantage of Cached
Exchange Mode for e-mail access even when
they’re disconnected.
In the future, after it completes the
localization of its voice-mail system, SOK
Group will take advantage of the unified
messaging capabilities of Exchange Server
2007 SP1. The company will use the unified
inbox features so that employees can access
e-mail, voice mail, and faxes from a single
client, such as the Microsoft Office Outlook
2007 messaging and collaboration client.
Grachev is excited about two prospects:
employees having their own voice mailboxes
(which they did not have previously) and the
ability to set up an automated attendant for
the company’s corporate entities.
In addition, Grachev anticipates that
employees will use the integration between
Exchange Server 2007 and Office Outlook
2007 to schedule meeting rooms and other
resources, such as equipment and
machinery. “The users are just learning how
to use the Scheduling Assistant between
Exchange Server 2007 and Office Outlook
2007. I think it will be very popular in the
future,” he says.
Benefits
With the deployment of Microsoft Exchange
Server 2007 SP1, SOK Group has derived
benefits both for its IT staff and for its users.
The IT staff enjoys more automated
management of the e-mail system as a
whole, and at the same time, it has deployed
a more robust infrastructure for its extensive
array of companies. Its users, on the other
hand, experience far fewer instances of
malicious software and take advantage of
easier remote access.
Fewer Mundane Tasks for IT
The IT staff spends less time dealing with
manual processes now. “With the Exchange
Management Shell, we are able to automate
a lot of activities,” Grachev says. “We can
even deploy a new domain on a completely
automated basis.” Grachev’s team also uses
the tools in the Exchange Management Shell
to generate many of the reports it distributes
to the different corporate entities of SOK
Group. Using the Exchange Server 2007 SDK
to build custom transport agents means that
the IT staff spends less time working on
mundane tasks and can now focus on more
strategic activities.
Less Downtime
Because of its extensive infrastructure,
encompassing 40 companies and 60 e-mail
domains, SOK Group periodically suffered
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Microsoft subsidiary. To access information
using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com
For more information about SOK Group
products and services, visit the Web site at:
www.sok.ru
Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
downtime of e-mail. This caused
communication difficulties for the executives
who relied on it. With the upgrade and the
use of the three cluster nodes for high
availability came greater reliability and
uptime. “We found Exchange Server 2007
SP1 to be much more flexible in our
environment,” reports Grachev. As with the
automation capability, this frees the IT staff
to be more proactive.
For more information about the Microsoft
server product portfolio, go to:
www.microsoft.com/servers
For more information about Microsoft
Exchange Server, go to:
www.microsoft.com/exchange
Less Malicious Software
With the capabilities in Exchange Server
2007 SP1 to combat viruses and spam at the
edge of a corporate network, as SOK Group
has configured it, users have fewer instances
of malicious software to deal with on their
workstations and portable computers. SOK
Group estimates that it has reduced the
instance of malicious software by up to 95
percent.
Easier Remote Access
Outlook Web Access includes several new
features that are useful to company
executives who access e-mail remotely.
Outlook Web Access now provides the ability
for the user to set the language configuration,
so that even if users log on a computer that is
set to use a different language, they can
reset the preferred language to Russian.
Outlook Web Access also provides the ability
to browse the corporate directory, as opposed
to searching for a specific name, and it can
display information about the location of
other users in addition to their contact
information. Laptop users also take
advantage of Cached Exchange Mode,
Grachev notes, so that they can view e-mail
even when they are disconnected from the
network.
Software and Services

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT
MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS
SUMMARY.
Document published October 2007
Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
− Microsoft Exchange Server 2007
Service Pack 1 (SP1)
− Microsoft Operations Manager 2005

Technologies
− Cached Exchange Mode
− Microsoft Office Outlook Web Access