Customer Case Study

Linens ‘n Things
One of the nation’s largest and fastest growing specialty retailers of home textiles, house-wares and home accessories operating in 40 states and 2 provinces of Canada. As of December 31, 2000 Linens ‘n Things operated 284 stores averaging approximately 35,000 gross square feet each and reported annual sales approaching $1.5 billion.

The company has approximately 400 remote users with web-based e-mail but requiring file access as well. These include traditional ‘road-warrior’ types such as travelling buyers, as well as promotional staff working at home and a large number of district managers scattered around the country.

“Most of our remote user community was already familiar with web-based mail using an OWA interface which has been in place for over 3 years. Integration with FileWay™ was therefore a natural evolution, appearing simply as another feature on the OWA screen. FileWay also allowed us to avoid having to support VPNs and end-user PCs.”

Gary Stein, IT Manager for Linens ‘n Things.”

 

FileWay was placed on the existing OWA server residing in the DMZ. Single sign-on authentication is achieved through integration with Active Directory using FileWay’s .NET proxy. Authorization is achieved by recognizing and enforcing users’ rights as defined in existing user directories and in Active Directory. All normal OWA functionality supplied by the Exchange 2000 server is preserved.

The following figure illustrates high-level architecture
for FileWay Deployment at Linen n' Things