Radisson Hotels Group IT Manager sets an email standard

Bobby Abraham is standing in the exclusive lobby of the 5-star Radisson Edwardian Hotel in Mayfair, London. “We wanted to include a bit of this in our corporate emails”, Abraham says, gesturing to the chic lobby around him. Bobby Abraham is Group IT Manager of Radisson Edwardian Group, a group of 13 luxury hotels in London and Manchester. One year ago, Abraham had been given the task to find a solution that would ensure that no email left the company without a legal disclaimer and that each email was branded with the Radisson corporate image: luxury without the pretense. “At the time we were relying on users to add disclaimers and the Radisson logo in their Microsoft Outlook signatures”, says Abraham. “The problem was that we could not be sure that the disclaimer and logo were added to every email, and if we needed to make changes it was an extremely time consuming task.” “The legal department was not comfortable with the situation”, Abraham adds. “Apart from adding email disclaimers for legal reasons, Radisson also needed to comply with the UK Companies Act that requires all corporate emails to include the company registration number, place of registration and registered office address. Simply relying on users to meet this compliancy requirement was not a satisfactory solution.” Abraham evaluated Policy Patrol Disclaimers for Exchange Server and a number of other products. “Policy Patrol allowed us to centrally create a legal disclaimer that was added to every email, as well as brand all our external emails with our corporate image. Editing the email disclaimer and logo was simply a matter of updating the disclaimer template. We found that Policy Patrol offered the best Exchange Server and Active Directory integration, making it easy to install and deploy into our existing Active Directory Group structure”.

Another requirement for the Radisson group was the ability to customise their email branding per hotel. Even though the hotels are part of the same group, each Radisson hotel has a distinctive character. The 5-star Radisson Mayfair Hotel is about exclusivity, the Radisson Heathrow Hotel is an airport hotel that aims to feel anything but, and the Radisson Hotel in Manchester boasts several awards including Tourism Awards’ Hotel of the Year and the Expedia Insiders’ Select award. “Since our hotels are organised in different Active Directory groups, configuring a different email signature for each hotel was a snap in Policy Patrol,” explains Abraham. “Updating email signatures is now so easy that we have also started adding event announcements and other seasonal messages to our emails”, says Abraham. “Recently, our hotels switched off and dimmed the lights in support of the Earth Hour, a global initiative to show we care about climate change. We included a banner on the initiative in all our emails in the weeks leading up to the event and received quite some positive feedback,2 he says.