Robert Bird Group is a specialist engineering consultancy established in 1982 and now part of the Surbana Jurong Group. With over 700 staff across eleven offices globally, the firm delivers structural, civil and geotechnical engineering services. Their project portfolio includes Bank Underground Station, the Athletes Village, Heathrow Terminal 5, Westfield centers and the Burj Khalifa.

The challenge

Filing emails has always been part of Robert Bird's QA procedure. For years, the firm used Exchange Public Folders: any external email sent or received was to be saved into a project-specific folder. The rule was clear. The reality was predictable. Filing depended entirely on users remembering to do it. 

People got busy. Emails accumulated. Staff left with correspondence unfiled. Years later, someone would need a fee proposal or a design email and discover it had never been saved. Retrieval meant mounting a departed colleague's mailbox and spending hours searching through it. 

Robert Bird then tried a cloud-based alternative. It failed. The migration did not honor their folder structure, dumping all emails into a single pool rather than organizing by project. Users could file but could not search, which defeated the purpose entirely. The firm's data now sat with a third party rather than under their own control. As Jamie's slide summarises it: "The cloud solution put all emails in one big pool and created a bit of a mess of our data." 

The solution

Ideagen's Mail Manager worked with Robert Bird's existing folder structure. Each project already had its own public folder. Nothing needed to be rebuilt. Jamie Razek, IT Manager for the West Region covering Europe, the Middle East and the USA, configured the MSI installer with central preferences and license key. The deployment platform pushed a silent installation: kill Outlook, install Ideagen's Mail Manager, display completion message. 

Time per machine: seconds. For remote offices the process was equally simple. Export the XML configuration, send to remote IT staff, import, adjust the path. The entire global rollout was managed from one desk in London. 

Robert Bird used DFS (Distributed File System) to expose each office's public folders, creating a resource folder to hold central configuration files. Engineers in London can file emails into folders managed by Dubai or Sydney offices seamlessly. The resource folder is locked so only IT staff can modify central preferences, keeping all users on an identical setup. 

Training was delivered through multiple channels: on-site sessions for UK staff, online sessions for Dubai, Australia and Asia. Trained users became IT reps for their teams. The Ideagen's Mail Manager website tutorials and webinars provided ongoing support; Jamie includes links in staff communications and encourages sign-ups even for experienced users. 

The results

For the first time, every Robert Bird office worldwide operates to exactly the same email filing standards. The test group feedback was used to fine-tune the shared user preferences, bringing uniformity and consistency across the entire group. 

User adoption was helped by existing champions: several staff had used Ideagen's Mail Manager at previous firms and became advocates. One director who was already a fan helped bring other directors on board. The context helped too: everyone remembered the pain of searching through a departed colleague's archive. 

One technical issue arose early: the original Linux file server with a caching appliance caused file locking problems. The support team responded immediately and recommended switching to a Windows server. The switch resolved it permanently and there have been no issues since. 

Jamie's assessment: 

It does what it says on the box. It's pretty easy to use. It learns from you, the more you use it the more it learns from your filing habits.

Jamie Razek

IT Manager, Robert Bird Group

Key outcomes

  • Global deployment in seconds per machine, entire rollout managed from one desk in London 
  • ~400GB of historic email data recovered from the failed cloud solution and correctly structured 
  • Every office worldwide on identical settings via centrally controlled user preference file 
  • NTFS permissions control access to confidential project folders with no additional configuration 
  • IT controls locked so only the IT team can modify central preferences 
  • On-site and online training delivered across all 11 offices; users became IT reps for their teams 
  • Support team resolved every issue promptly by phone, email or remote session 

What this means for firms like yours

For global engineering firms, inconsistent email practices create risk that compounds with scale. When a question arises about what was agreed on a project, the answer should not depend on which office handled the correspondence or whether the original team is still with the company. 

Robert Bird's journey proves that global deployment does not require global complexity. A failed cloud migration taught them what not to do. Ideagen's Mail Manager delivered what they needed: seconds-per-machine deployment, one consistent standard worldwide and complete control over their own data.