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McDonald and Seifert Engineering

McDonald and Seifert Engineering is a vertically integrated engineering-services firm working in such areas as water resources, wastewater management and environmental services. The company offers consulting, engineering, scientific investigations, laboratory analysis, construction management and contract operations and maintenance services. Its clients include an international roster of several hundred customers in both the public and private sectors.

MSE has 800 employees working out of offices in 13 U.S. states and five foreign countries, including a distributed direct sales force of 75 people and 300 field employees working on the many engineering projects being managed by the company. Field staff often work out of temporary facilities in remote locations. Maintaining effective communications with the sales and field support staff is an ongoing challenge, and the firm is heavily dependent on both cellular voice and e-mail communications. About 74 percent of the staff relies on Microsoft Exchange for e-mail services, while the balance--new employees of MSE by virtue of a recent acquisition--use Lotus Domino. Long-range plans call for consolidation onto a single messaging platform, probably Exchange, but that is unlikely to occur until late 2004.

Most of MSE's remote employees access e-mail via notebook computers by dialing to a remote-access VPN. Almost half of the remote employees also use PDAs, including devices from Palm and Compaq and even a few smart phones from Samsung and Handspring. Most of these devices have been acquired by the employees themselves. While MSE's IS staff attempts to provide support when problems arise, the company has no official supported platform and has not deployed any enterprise applications to these devices. The most common applications are maintenance of address books and synchronization of appointment schedules with Microsoft Outlook.

Although MSE would prefer to accommodate personal preferences and deliver e-mail services to a range of different devices, it's clear that standardizing on a single platform would be more efficient. MSE management feels that employee resistance to standardization would be manageable, provided the services available would be perceived as beneficial to most employees. MSE understands that the implementation of wireless e-mail services will likely result in increased service fees, but it hopes that at least some of these costs will be offset by a reduction in cellular-phone usage. The company also envisions eventual implementation of other mobile applications and would like to acquire an extensible wireless e-mail system to support a range of back-end systems.

MSE Vital Stats

• 800 employees

• 6 countries, including the United States, with MSE offices

• 375 mobile employees