Office365 Case study
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4 October 2011
Graham & Green’s IT Manager, Darek Szuminski talks about why he chose Microsoft Cloud services.
“I’ve migrated more than 40 mailboxes without losing more hair, which made me happy, I’ve made an £8K annual cost saving, which made my MD very happy; we still use Office apps and didn’t have to train anyone how to use the service” Graham & Green is a family run business with 37 years history offering unique furniture and home accessories; it was set up in Notting Hill back in 1974. Graham & Green have two shops in London; publish 4 catalogues a year and a beautifully designed ecommerce site to compliment the catalogue. We have a great loyal base of customers and we are pleased to attract new customers all the time. Graham & Green have been successfully growing our business whilst other home ware retail brands are sadly struggling in current economic climate. Last year as a part of business wide restructuring process I was looking for IT cost savings opportunities, the obvious one was our hosted exchange cost of almost £20 per mailbox.  I decided to look for an alternative. Email is a crucial part of communication for us, therefore I knew the service not only had to be cheaper than the current service but also be secure and reliable. It needed to offer plenty of email space, web access and have the option to migrate existing mailboxes; those were my primary choice criteria. I was looking at offerings from many different companies including Google, but although they all offered a cost saving, there were other issues, one of them was our users were not familiar with Google Apps and Graham & Green had already invested in Microsoft Office licenses. There was also a question over migration of all the mailboxes to the new service, without disrupting the day to day work. I’ve received a call from Northern Star, offering me an alternative email solution from Microsoft; it couldn’t have been more perfect timing for that call. It was a cloud service accessible via a web browser or Outlook client and offering a 25 GB mailbox per user, not to mention SharePoint, Live Meeting as well as Hosted BlackBerry Service. I knew that Graham and Green buyers would appreciate those benefits on their next trip to India. That was something I was looking for, a solution that will integrate with my Microsoft applications seamlessly in the office and provide support for mobile devices and web email client. There was even a free 30 day trial, I wondered where the catch was, but there wasn’t any. Northern Star helped me to set up a trial for few users and I started the migration, it was much easier than I thought. With the migration software provided by Microsoft it was a really easy and stress free experience and the service offered me all the administration options that I needed. Before the trial ended I had added the rest of the users to the service and converted it from a trial to a paid for subscription. Support helped me to setup SMTP mailboxes, it’s good to know that there is someone who can help when you need it and someone who you can actually speak to, I like support where there is a person on the other side not just a mail and web form. With all mailboxes migrated my users didn’t even noticed that something has changed, success! I’ve migrated more than 40 mailboxes without losing more hair, which made me happy, I’ve made an £8K annual cost saving, which made my MD very happy; we still use Office apps and didn’t have to train anyone how to use the service, which made everyone happy. I’m really glad I got that call from Northern Star, after more than a year using BPOS I can say it was good decision to choose Microsoft’s cloud offering and I wouldn’t change it. The only thing left is to migrate to Office 365, based on experience so far I’m sure it will be seamless transition.
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