Gleadell Agriculture Ltd in Microsoft's Cloud
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In the five years that I have worked at Gleadell Agriculture Ltd the company has almost doubled in size and is continuing to grow. With this in mind, last year we started to look at how best to reorganise the IT strategy to cope with the growth and to enable flexibility in our options going forward. We wanted to upgrade our in-house systems including Exchange 2003 server, LCS 2005 and SharePoint server. In order to do this we would have to replace 3-4 servers, replacing the 32bit servers with 64bit and upgrade the internal storage to cope with the forecasted growth in the next 5 years. After looking at the cost for the specification we required and the difficulty we had had in trying to predict the capacity requirements based on the next 5 year growth of the company we decided to look at cloud options as an alternative. At around this time we had a call from Northern Star and began to talk over our options and what the Microsoft BPOS solution could offer us. It was a great help to be able to talk to a company that had real world experience in this area and the BPOS solution began to look like an attractive option. It would completely eliminate the requirement of 4 expensive servers, backup and replication solutions and antivirus requirements for email. It would also take away the issues of capacity planning as we could provision mailboxes and disk space as required. We made the decision and began to work with Northern Star on the migration strategy. The Gleadell IT department were concerned about down time and disruption. Gleadells, like most companies now, are very reliant on IT and especially communications such as email. Northern Star explained that we didn’t need to take the systems offline and could even migrate the mailboxes piecemeal. We decided to move one department at a time and then finally completed the migration with no downtime and minimal disruption. We are pretty big users of email and Office Communicator and our employees are finding that the cloud solution provides them with a better experience in that fact that they do not need to VPN into the office to use these services and are able to have much bigger mailbox sizes. We are beginning to make greater use of the SharePoint services and are gradually introducing the users to the advantages that SharePoint provides and the seamless integration into the familiar office products they already use. This has also freed up the IT department to concentrate on providing greater and more visible value to the company instead of spending time managing and maintaining server applications. We feel the cloud strategy that we have implemented currently provides a great service and a greater platform for moving forward. We are looking forward to the roll out of Office 365.
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