Health and fitness chain Holmes Place is preparing the second stage of a company-wide roll-out of Microsoft's Windows 2000 and Exchange servers, claiming that it has already made cost savings.

The group has linked 120 users at its two head offices in London and is waiting for BT to roll out its ADSL service before it can go live with the second phase. It plans to complete the project by the end of the year.

Ian Takats, the company's group IS manager, said the deployment will allow Holmes Place to manage one server centrally, lowering the total cost of ownership and freeing up 40 servers for use elsewhere.

"It has certainly saved the company money. We were spending up to 20 per cent of our time supporting the email servers in the club. The other benefits are speed and stability as it hasn't crashed yet," he said.

"In a way you could say it's already paid for itself, purely by the fact that we're not getting any more complaints internally. I don't have the finance director phoning me up in a panic saying: 'Where is the email my department sent to you?'," explained Takats.

He added that the project has gone well so far, although it took eight months to complete due to staffing and equipment problems.

If the project had been managed properly, it would have been completed in six weeks, he said. He advised users considering implementing Exchange to ensure that they have enough disk storage space before going ahead.

Such a problem caused the company to repartition its server.

Also published in Computing