Microsoft Exchange Server 2010Customer Solution Case Study

New Gold enriches collaboration and messaging environment with Exchange 2010 SP1

OverviewCountry or Region: CanadaIndustry: Mining

Customer ProfileNew Gold Inc. is a Canadian gold company that resulted when New Gold Inc., Peak Gold Ltd. and Metallica Resources Inc. combined businesses.

Business SituationThe company recently underwent a “merger of equals” with Western Goldfields Inc. and needed to quickly consolidate its disparate messaging environment. In 2010, New Gold decided to revamp its messaging infrastructure using Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 SP1.

SolutionWith its upgrade to Exchange Server 2010 SP1, New Gold has consolidated its messaging infrastructure into a highly available environment that better supports its business users while reducing IT costs.

Benefits Enhanced IT management Improved productivity Streamlined communications

“Our messaging technology is mission-critical when it comes to our competitive edge and standing within the industry. Right now, our industry is extremely competitive and we are using Exchange Server 2010 SP1 to ensure that we can communicate quickly and effectively at all times”

Brett Gagnon, Vice President, Information Technology, New Gold Inc.

New Gold is an intermediate gold mining company listed on the TSX and the NYSE-AMEX. It has offices in Vancouver, British Columbia and Toronto, Ontario, with mining operations in the United States, Mexico and Australia and development projects in Canada and Chile. The company recently underwent a business combination and needed to quickly consolidate its disparate messaging environment. In 2010, New Gold decided to revamp its messaging infrastructure using Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 SP1. With its upgrade to Exchange Server 2010 SP1, New Gold has consolidated its messaging infrastructure into a highly available environment that better supports its business users while reducing IT costs. The new environment also gives employees a single point of access to email and instant messaging, along with data in other applications.

SituationWhen it comes to today’s mining sector, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) between companies have become de rigeur. This recent wave of M&A activity is particularly true in the face of a growing scarcity of resources and rebounding commodity prices.

Case in point: Canadian mining company New Gold Inc. was created when New Gold, Peak Gold Ltd. and Metallica Resources Inc. combined their businesses in 2008. In June of 2009 there was an additional “merger of equals” between the New Gold Inc. and Western Goldfields Inc. (WGI Transaction). The ‘new’ New Gold now has an enviable portfolio of development and exploration assets globally and produced 382,911 ounces of gold in 2010. Simply put, this portfolio of operating assets and development projects makes New Gold a stronger player in the highly competitive mining industry.

As a geographically dispersed company, email is one of the most heavily used applications at New Gold. From senior management to miners, employees need to be able to quickly use email in the course of their day-to-day jobs in order to rapidly share progress reports and related data in the office, in the mines as well as on the road.

The historical transactions created a highly disparate IT infrastructure —including legacy ERP, messaging and business applications —that the newly created IT team at New Gold wanted to consolidate and standardize. This inherited environment was a mix of third-party hosted email environments, private servers

and previous iterations of Microsoft Exchange Server. The company also wanted to improve the efficiency of its communications, especially among mobile employees who frequently had to call in to check their voicemail messages.

Brett Gagnon, Vice President of Information Technology at New Gold readily acknowledges that with operations spread out in locations such as the Mesquite Mine in the United States, the Cerro San Pedro Mine in Mexico and Peak Gold Mines in Australia, ensuring that communication and collaboration is accessible and highly available is not always an easy task.

“We were essentially trying to run a single mining organization with multiple messaging environments and methods of communication. Needless to say, we needed a more cost-effective and productive way to communicate. With nearly 1,000 employee mailboxes, this had the potential to impact our ability to operate effectively and competitively,” says Gagnon.

To better meet the messaging requirements of the newly combined company, job one for New Gold was to improve the performance, scalability and stability of its email system.

SolutionAs a predominantly Windows IT shop, the company was looking to take advantage of a wholly integrated IT infrastructure using Microsoft technologies. In 2010, New Gold decided to revamp its messaging infrastructure using Microsoft® Exchange

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Server 2010 SP1 email messaging and Microsoft® Lync™ Server 2010 collaboration software. Today, all inbound email travels through the head office using a server environment platform based on Exchange 2010 SP1.

With its upgrade to Exchange Server 2010 SP1, New Gold has consolidated its messaging infrastructure into a highly available environment that better supports its business users while reducing IT costs. The new environment also gives employees a single point of access to email and instant messaging, along with mission-critical data in other applications. The company is also able to use Exchange Server 2010 SP1 to simplify the setup and administration of remote mailboxes and give users more choice in client devices and Web browsers.

The company is also using Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 for enhanced management control over resources across the enterprise and the Active Directory service for accounts and rights management across the network. Windows Server 2008 R2 is designed to provide built-in security mechanisms and better performance by reducing power consumption and lowering overhead costs.

“We leverage an amazing amount of Microsoft software to drive our business and opted for a staged deployment approach, one where we allowed ourselves two to three months to stabilize the environment after we migrated to Exchange 2010 SP1. During this time, we were able to gauge end-user feedback, which has been very positive to date,” says Gagnon. “We’re also using the security features in Exchange. We do use digital

signatures and encrypted email, which is a very valuable feature when it comes to things like digital sign-offs or sending secure documentation.”

The company also deployed Microsoft® System Center data center solutions to help simplify server management. This includes Microsoft System Center Service Manager 2010 to conduct real-time asset tracking and to resolve the issue of monitoring inactive computers and Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager to better manage patches, image deployment and software/hardware inventories. And to facilitate a “huge disaster recovery business continuity push”, Gagnon notes the company is backing up this new integrated environment with Microsoft® Data Protection Manager 2010 for continuous data protection of Windows application and file servers.

“Using System Center tools has been great to increase visibility into our IT assets and also improve our ability to manage our software and hardware inventories,” says Gagnon. “Using these IT tools definitely help us be more competitive within this industry.”

The company is using a platform of Microsoft technologies that includes Microsoft® Office 2010, Microsoft 2010 server applications, and Windows 7 Enterprise. With the new consolidated messaging platform, New Gold also recently deployed Microsoft® Lync™ Server 2010 to extend the Exchange Server environment with advanced unified messaging capabilities like audio conferencing, video conferencing and desktop sharing. With the new unified

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communication platform in place, the IT team at New Gold is able to deliver improved performance and support lower cost storage, which makes larger mailboxes more affordable.

BenefitsBy consolidating its messaging environment using Exchange Server 2010 SP1, New Gold is taking advantage of a host of communication and collaboration benefits.

Enhanced IT managementIn general, the company is using several integrated Microsoft technologies to achieve stronger business success. For example, New Gold is using Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010 SP1 to take advantage of improved failover capabilities and to support larger mailboxes. Gagnon notes that the new solution is more stable and much easier to manage, which means that the IT staff has fewer issues to resolve. Configuring remote access for employees has become a less complex proposition because IT administrators no longer have to set up VPN access or configure multiple applications for email and IM.

Improved productivityThe standardized messaging environment frees up time for New Gold employees to be more productive when working remotely. Employees now have more reliable access to their email and can view presence information or interact with contacts through the Microsoft Office Outlook messaging and collaboration client. Workers will also be able to cut the

time spent catching up on an email thread with Conversation View, another feature of Outlook 2010, which helps to organize email messages by topic. With this capability, employees can view all messages in a conversation at a single glance. They can also be more productive using unified messaging features such as the new voicemail preview capability with unified messaging, which enables them to receive a text-based version of voicemail messages in their unified inbox.

“For our staff, email is perhaps the most powerful business and communications tool we now have at our disposal,” says Gagnon. He added that employees are also better equipped to prioritize and manage their communications with new features, such as MailTips, which help ensure that users get their message delivered correctly the first time. For example, staff —prior to clicking on the send button—can determine whether a message recipient is out of the office or a message is being sent to a large distribution list.

Streamlined communicationsWith Exchange 2010 SP1 in place, New Gold has been able to streamline how its employees access email and IM, support more choice in mobile devices and Web browsers and give mobile employees access to more features in email. Using Lync Server provides enhanced versions of the communications capabilities previously provided by Office Communications Server 2007 R2 — including presence, instant messaging, and conferencing and enterprise voice. The company is also looking at implementing a common intranet portal for employees using Microsoft SharePoint 2010.

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“Our messaging technology is mission-critical when it comes to our competitive edge and standing within the industry. Right now, our industry is extremely competitive and we’re using Exchange Server 2010 SP1 to ensure that we can communicate quickly and effective at all times,” says Gagnon.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2010Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 can help you achieve better business outcomes while controlling the costs of deployment, administration, and compliance. Exchange Server 2010 delivers the widest range of deployment options, integrated information leakage protection, and advanced compliance capabilities, which combine to form the best messaging and collaboration solution available.

For more information about Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, go to:www.microsoft.com/exchange

For more information about Microsoft Unified Communications, go to:www.microsoft.com/uc

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For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:www.microsoft.com

For more information about New Gold Inc. products and services, visit the website at: http://www.newgold.com/Home/default. aspx

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published April 2011

Software and Services

Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010 SP1 Microsoft® Lync™ Server 2010 Microsoft® Office 2010 Windows 7 Enterprise Microsoft® System Center Configuration

Manager Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Microsoft® Data Protection Manager

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