American Tower Corporation (NYSE: AMT) is a leading infrastructure provider for the wireless and broadcasting industries. Headquartered in Boston, the company owns and operates approximately 15,000 sites in the U.S., Mexico and Brazil.
SUCCESSFUL DATA COLLECTION
Within a matter of weeks, ATC has seen an 80-85% AD data collection completed, with accuracy.
ADMIN HOURS SAVED
Imanami products enabled ATC save hours spent on administrative tasks in a month with increased productivity.
WebDir is a Web-based Directory Management solution that extends the function of Directory and Group management to end-users. With WebDir, ATC (American Tower Corporation) employees can search the global address list, change their passwords, update their own information, and manage their own groups via any browser.
Making internal communications faster
ATC is working on integrating WebDir into its Intranet site to provide a Web-based staff directory. This will allow them to eliminate their old phone book system and have access to the most recent data all the time.
“We had run into a typical problem when we were using Exchange® 5.5 Server, and our users couldn’t upload their contact information themselves,” explains Meek. “We looked into what most Exchange Administrators were using, tried WebDir, and found it to be a great fit.” “We found a perfect fit with WebDir,” says Meek. “It’s well-written software, it does what Imanami says it will do, there are consistent and excellent updates, and it’s competitively priced.”
To maximize the advantages of SmartDL, ATC’s next step was to fill in its global address list. To facilitate this data collection, ATC and Imanami came up with a clever application using WebDir and SmartDL together, with the addition of a custom Distribution List.
Populating Active Directory Effortlessly
ATC has seen a great response from its initial use of SmartDL. With the help of Imanami, ATC set up SmartDL to auto-search its Active Directory every night, and build a Distribution List of all those employees who were still missing attributes such as an address, city, state, zip code, or phone number.
“Within a matter of weeks, our AD data collection was 80-85% complete,” says Meek. “We anticipate being up to 99% within a couple of months. Without SmartDL, we had no method of getting employees to fill in that data. An accurate and complete Global Address List will be a valuable asset to the company, as it will provide faster, more accurate internal communications.” “The Global Address List is available to everyone via Microsoft Outlook,” explains Meek. “We will now be able to use this as our primary company white pages, which will ensure that people have the most up-to-date contact information, with very little maintenance or administrative hassle.”
With a portfolio of approximately 15,000 tower sites, American Tower Corporation’s (ATC) employee base spans across the U.S., Mexico, and Brazil. This makes internal communications particularly challenging – and important. ATC found the task of manually maintaining its company directory and distribution lists (DLs) labor-intensive, resulting in information being out-of-date or inaccurate. All changes required manual coding, and when the changes fell behind, company communications became unreliable.
Many of the company’s current employees are field-based – which makes managing a company directory particularly difficult. “We have a unique challenge, with so many people located in different offices and cities,” says Corbin Meek, Exchange Administrator for American Tower Corporation.
To improve the quality of internal communications and reduce administrative costs, ATC deployed two tools from Imanami, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. The first, WebDir, enables employees to access and manage their directory information via any browser. The second, SmartDL, automates the creation and management of Distribution Lists. “I’ve used many applications,” Meek continues, “and I’m happy with the ease of administration of Imanami’s products. They have some of the best support in the business – partly because the products work so well that you almost never have to call.”
As a result of deploying these tools, ATC’s directory is now much more accurate; staff members can readily locate and communicate with each other; and administrators are relieved of hours of manual coding, improving productivity throughout the organization. ATC has reaped a valuable productivity boost by implementing Imanami’s WebDir and SmartDL. The products are serving to make internal communications faster and more accurate and eliminating considerable administrative labor.
