overview
Envy Create – a multi-national digital design agency – uses Microsoft Office 365 / BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) to achieve cost-effective and reliable communications and collaboration.
"It’s cloud-based so we can use it everywhere and anywhere around the world. It’s a much better package than we had before." - Adrian Le Mans, Managing Director, Envy Create
customer profile
Envy Create is a leading Creative Marketing and Communications Agency with offices in the USA & Europe, but with a reach that extends throughout EMEA and Australasia.
Business Situation
Envy, with an international client base, frequently conducts assignments, utilising teams comprising employees that are located across its international network of offices. The work requires continuous collaboration and communication between the team members to ensure the client's solutions are developed effectively within the typical context of a brief and requirements that are constantly changing.
To facilitate collaboration and communication, great dependency was placed on the use of email. Partly as a result of previous company acquisitions, Envy Create were using an email solution based on a disparate range of technologies and email clients, including Exchange and POP, etc. giving both an inconsistent end-user experience and range of features.
The email solution was hosted and supported by external IT suppliers, who did not provide any SLAs (Service Level Agreements) for guaranteed uptime and service quality, resulting in poor service levels and slow response times to fix issues. In addition, the IT supplier contracts were very expensive and inflexible.
solution
Envy decided to rationalise their email solution, based on multiple technologies, to a single technology platform. They also defined high-level business requirements for collaboration and communication in general, not just email. These included competitive pricing, flexible supplier contracts, guaranteed high levels of service and uptime, enterprise-level features, such as calendaring and archiving, ability to provide email clients for PCs and MACs, document management, web conferencing, the ability to integrate with a future planned CRM solution.
After a review of various supplier offerings and solutions, Envy identified Microsoft’s Office 365 / BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) as best meeting its business requirements, both in the short term and the long term. This Cloud services based solution also met one of the company’s strategic objectives of allowing it to focus its management, employee resources, and capital wholly on its core business activities, rather than being distracted trying to operate and finance its own IT.
To assist in the implementation of Office 365 / BPOS, Pygmalion, a Microsoft Gold Partner was contracted.
As a first phase, Pygmalion provided services to implement an improved email solution, and these included:
- Project plan for migration of employees located in USA, Europe.
- Ensure backups of existing and archived emails.
- Migration of emails stored in Exchange, POP servers, and local/PST mail stores to BPOS Online Exchange.
- Migration of user accounts from on-premise to BPOS Active Directory.
- Creation of end-user manuals.
- Configuration of email clients for both Windows and MAC based PCs/laptops, utilizing remote support tools where necessary.
- Testing and handover.
The migration was completed over a weekend to ensure minimal/no disruption to the email solution.
A second phase of work will involve migrating the company’s documents stored in a variety of locations i.e. file shares distributed across several servers – to a centralized document management system on SharePoint Online.
Benefits
- An enterprise-class email solution with a low fixed monthly charge.
- A reduction of at least 70% in the operating cost of providing email services compared to a previous hosting contract.
- Improvement in the uptime of email services to 99.9% compared to the previous situation with frequent downtime and an inconsistent quality of support.
company name
Envy Create
Industry
Digital Agency
Country
United Kingdom, Australia, USA
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