The Customer

Liberty Bank of Arkansas is a full-service banking institution headquartered in Jonesboro, Arkansas, with 45 branches throughout the state.  

The Customer's Requirement

Unified communications with Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) is a core component of Liberty Bank’s collaboration within and between its geographically-dispersed branches.  

Because Liberty Bank recognizes that IM chats are important business records, they wanted to archive IM conversations and then enable end users to view their respective chat histories on demand.  In addition, they wanted to empower department managers, IT Managers, and Human Resources to research employee IM conversations for internal usage policy enforcement and oversight. 

The Solution:  Instant Archive Viewer for Microsoft OCS  

Instant Archive Viewer from Instant Technologies provides role-based archive search and discovery for Microsoft OCS.   

• Internal usage policies are easily enforced;  
• Compliance audits and legal discovery requests are completely fulfilled; and  
• The information that would otherwise be locked in an organization’s OCS archives instead becomes a usable (and valuable) business asset.  

“Our employees use Instant Archive Viewer in two different methods,” says Brad Crawley, Vice President—Network Administrator at Liberty Bank.   “At first, we integrated Instant Archive Viewer into the Microsoft Office Communicator client.  This worked extremely well.  We also put a link to Instant Archive Viewer on our corporate intranet.  We found that most employees used the link on the corporate intranet so they could maximize archive views in the web browser rather than mess with resizing Microsoft Communicator windows.  We then opted to remove the tab in Communicator; all employees now go to the Intranet to view their IM archives.”  

Easy to Integrate  

“Due to some unique characteristics of our environment, we used Instant Technologies’ support team to aid in the installation of Instant Archive Viewer,” says Mr Crawley.  “Instant’s support team was very proactive in getting the solution installed and tailored for our institution’s requirements.”  

Robust Capabilities, Easy to Use, No Burden on Exchange Resources 

Instant Archive Viewer successfully balances a comprehensive feature set with an intuitive interface that requires little or no training for administrators, managers, or end users.   

Prior to deploying Instant Archive Viewer, Liberty Bank’s end users had to turn on the “Conversation History” feature in OCS, in conjunction with Outlook 2007, in order to research past chats.  This was a less-than-ideal manual process with the added detriment of consuming significant Exchange resources.  

“Instant Archive Viewer gives us the best of both worlds,” says Mr Crawley.  “End users have an easy-to-use interface to review their chat histories on demand so they can be more productive without eating up Exchange resources, while the product’s role-based research capabilities for end users, managers, and HR are second to none.”  

Final Thoughts 

“Instant Archive Viewer is an excellent product,” concludes Mr Crawley.  “I highly recommend it for any organization utilizing Microsoft Office Communications Server for internal IM.”