Microsoft Online Services case study
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Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) helped our business save money, improved our employees productivity and took the stress out of managing IT, allowing us to focus on our core business. Our business We are a successful organisation that has been trading for many years providing Business Services to other organisations via a team of highly skilled consultants. Our IT Our business is heavily reliant on email, internet and access to contracts and quotes. Ensuring our IT systems are robust and reliable has always been a top priority for the company. For many years we have managed our own IT systems, we purchased servers to manage our emails and data and endured all the associated headaches and costs of running and maintaining these systems. Our problem We were spending quite a lot of money on IT every year for IT systems that were pretty good, but there was always a nagging doubt in my mind as to how reliable they were, how much would it cost to keep them running efficiently and up to date, what would happen in the event of a problem and how would these issues affect our business. Our business has suffered like all others in these tough economic times and we need to constantly keep a close eye on our costs whilst maintaining high availability IT systems, to ensure we are well placed to take advantage of the recovery. The IT Department suggested that we need to budget to replace or upgrade our Email and Data Servers and Software in the near future as they were “several years old, coming out of warranty and starting to creak”. Our solution Northern Star, a Microsoft Gold Partner, presented Microsoft’s Online Services BPOS suite to us via an Online Meeting. They suggested that rather than invest in new sever hardware and software, we investigated using BPOS, a set of Enterprise Software, delivered as a subscription service by Microsoft and sold through partners such as themselves. BPOS would basically provide us an Email and Data server hosted at one of Microsoft’s world wide datacentres. The Microsoft solution would save us significant amounts of money annually on having to buy, manage and maintain new server hardware and software and when you factor all the hidden cost savings i.e. the BPOS solution includes Anti-Virus & Anti-Spam, the savings just seemed to keep on going up. This was looking like an interesting proposition so Northern Star suggested that they set up a free trial of the service for us. They visited our offices and took the time to understand how we worked so that they could configure BPOS Service to suit our business. They set up a couple of trial users with email and access to data through the Exchange Online & SharePoint Online Services and introduced us to 2 other services, Office Live Meeting and Office Communicator Online. The email service worked really well for us, basically as we already used Outlook as the email client for each user, this was re-configured to use our Exchange Online service rather than our Exchange Server and we just carried on using email as we always had. They even set up our Iphones to enable us to send and receive email whilst on the move using the service. The Outlook web access was also a nice touch as this meant we could access our emails from any computer connected to the Internet. The data service also worked well and even had some additional functionality that seemed would be useful to the business. We were given access to our own Company Portal on the Internet where we could store our data. Northern Star explained that the Portal was customisable and showed us the different features available to us as well as data storage, such as having a team discussion board, an announcement section and a group calendar to name but a few. They also explained how we could restrict access to certain parts of the data to certain people and something I particularly like how we could “check-Out” documents to be worked on whilst we did not have Internet access. This was fantastic, I uploaded a couple of recent proposals that we were working on for clients so my colleagues could get an idea of what we were pitching. Then at the end of the day was able to check them out to my laptop so that I could work on them on the train on the way home. When I reconnected to the Internet the changes were synchronised. What a time saver! The other neat feature that became apparent was that the person who had last changed or authored the document was shown as being online or offline, this meant that if I had a question about a particular document that I could instantly communicate with the author using Office Communicator Online. Now you might ask why I did not email them, shout across the office or use the phone, the answer is that they don’t work in the same office as me, so I never know if they are on the phone, online or even at work. This “presence” indicator showing which of my colleagues is online is fantastic. Office Live meeting I have to say was less of a hit during the testing process, call me old fashioned but I still like to hold meetings face to face, but my colleague from IT who was testing the BPOS Service with me came up with the novel idea of delivering training on our products to several of our consultants who were not office based, at the same time. This seemed to go well and had the potential to save us lots in expenditure on expense claims and overnight hotel accommodation bills for our more tactical meetings. The Trial lasted for 30 days and towards the end it was becoming apparent that not all of the users would be able to use the email solution as our Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Package used by a handful of users needed to integrate with Exchange Server. However it was becoming obvious that the BPOS solution could work for our business for the majority of our users and at the same time provide a more robust and reliable service at a fraction of the costs that we had been paying in the past. Northern Star contacted us just before the trial ended and we explained that we thought the system could be implemented for our organisation but we had the CRM integration issue. They explained that this would not be a problem because the Microsoft Online Service was designed to co-exist with on-premise servers and applications and specifically we could continue to operate an Exchange Server at our offices for the handful of CRM users and this would fully synchronise with the Exchange Online Service and the rest of the users. They suggested that we could extend the warranty on our existing Exchange server rather than replace it for very little cost, because now it would have significantly less work to do only serving 6 users. After checking with my colleague in the IT Department it was agreed that this was a good way around the problem and would still save us a lot of money, the old Exchange server would operate for many years to come with such little load and if we needed to replace it in the future a much cheaper model could be purchased. So we asked Northern Star to prepare a proposal for migrating our users and setting up the BPOS solution for our business. There was a small set up, migration and monthly BPOS/support fee. We are now several months on and I can honestly say this was one of the best decisions we have ever made, gone are a lot of the headaches of running an IT system, what we have now is more secure, reliable and robust that before, with 99.9% uptime and we are now free to concentrate on our core business. We are more productive using the new tools such as Live meeting and Office Communicator that previously we did not have access to and now spend approximately 60% less on IT per annum. Our IT Department is now freed up to concentrate on the strategic issues facing our business rather than tactical mundane maintenance and management. My colleague in IT seems to have a smile on his face nowadays rather than the perpetual look of concern and impending doom that was there before. I would highly recommend that you take a closer look at Microsoft Online Services and BPOS and just take a moment to challenge how you are doing things currently.
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