Case Studies - ValleySpeak Project Server Case Study
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About CaseCentral
CaseCentral is the market leader in electronic discovery and litigation management
solutions for major law firms and corporations. The company is chosen to handle many
of the largest, most complex litigation projects in the nation. CaseCentral provides
the most widely used online document repository, which hosts massive document
collections for review by legal counsel, providing anytime, anywhere access for large,
dispersed litigation review teams. The company is also rapidly emerging as a capacity
leader in the electronic discovery services market with fast, affordable, high quality
electronic file conversion services. Headquartered in San Francisco, CaseCentral has
worked with 81 of the largest 100 US law firms (the American Lawyer Top 100) and the
legal departments of hundreds of leading corporations worldwide.
The Problem
Being an Application Service Provider (ASP), scalability, reliability and redundancy
are very important to CaseCentral when selecting the tools they work with. They have a
server farm of over 200 machines scattered across multiple locations. All of these
servers are managed by CaseCentral's IT department. Projects in IT department have very
high visibility within the organization. Engineering and marketing departments rely
heavily on IT projects. It is therefore natural that they are interested in tracking
IT projects.
Most of the project management within the IT department in the past was done by project
Managers using Microsoft Project. They would talk to all the Team Members in a weekly
status meeting and update the Microsoft Project files manually. They would then email
the updated Project files to the team and the company executives. This was an extremely
time consuming process. In addition to requiring each person to install Microsoft
Project on their machine, it required executives to manually open multiple files to see
their status. Most executives therefore preferred to call the Project Managers and ask
for status, and the Project Managers wasted a significant amount of time communicating
the schedule status.
The Solution
It was quite obvious to IT Project Manager, Navdeep Singh, that they needed a
centralized project management solution. Being a heavy user of Microsoft products their
first choice was Microsoft Project Server. However after doing a pilot project it
became obvious to them that Microsoft Project Server will not scale to their needs.
Despite the fact CaseCentral is highly proficient in the Windows environment (since its
the primary platform for their application), just installing Microsoft Project Server
was a daunting challenge. It took them longer than a week to set up Microsoft Project
Server, and later it needed constant bug fixes and was highly unstable. On average it
needed to be rebooted once a week. It was virus infected with a virus at one time and
all of the data was lost. Over time it became increasingly obvious to Navdeep that they
needed to investigate into other solutions.
Most of the solutions that they looked into were either too simple and meant for 10
person companies or too complex with costs running in hundreds of thousands of dollars.
After coming across ValleySpeak Project Server, they decided to give it a try. The
simplicity of the product impressed them. They were able to install it in 20 minutes
- it was up and running even before people realized what was going on.
Navdeep is now a big fan of ValleySpeak Project Server. "They have a great product and
great support", says Navdeep, "I personally use the ValleySpeak Project Server every
day and I am totally bowled over by its stability and ease of use. Our server has been
up and running for more than 6 months now. Not a single minute of downtime, while our
other servers keep crashing on us all the time."
Responsive and professional tech support is also one of the reasons that Navdeep likes
ValleySpeak Project Server. In his words, "ValleySpeak provides great support, period.
Their tech people are really on the ball. I did actually find one bug in their product;
I crafted a test case and fired off an email to support. I got a reply within 20
minutes, along the lines of "yep, that's a real bug... and it looks like it's gonna be
tricky to fix". Okay, fair enough, I wasn't expecting to hear anything for a while...
and then the very next day... "okay, here is a work around, that will fix your problem,
we have incorporated a fix and it will show up in the next release". How good is that?
I've worked for companies in the past where we couldn't even come within a mile of that
level of support!"
Conclusion
If you are looking for a browser based enterprise project management software product
that makes it easy to share your project schedules with your team in real time while
providing rich functionality and responsive tech support at a bargain price, look to
ValleySpeak.
Additional information about CaseCentral can be found at
www.casecentral.com.
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