overview
Meeting Magic – a facilitator of participative and productive meetings – adopts Microsoft Cloud Computing to provide an integrated IT business solution at a low cost and with Enterprise-class levels of quality of service.
customer profile
Meeting Magic, based in the UK and with clients across the world, facilitates participative and productive meetings, from strategic planning with leadership teams to large group meetings and conferences. Major clients include Mars, Microsoft and Pepsico Europe.
Business Situation
Meeting Magic utilises virtual working, whereby everyone in the company works from home. This places a huge and almost total reliance on IT and communications technology, requiring Enterprise-class levels of reliability and performance to enable it to operate efficiently and successfully. As an SMB it does not have the Enterprise levels of in-house technical resources and budgets.
They were using a mish-mash of different vendor solutions, comprising of both on-premises and hosted services to provide their business needs. e.g. Go To Meeting for conference calls; Office Net for calendar and file sharing; Claranet an external hosting company for email, data held locally on PCs/laptops and backed-up to external drives, Sage ACT contacts database, etc.
This resulted in high overall operating costs, administrative burden due to having several supplier contracts, employee productivity that was negatively impacted by a range of indifferent and poor service levels from the different vendors – with no SLAs (Service Level Agreements) and reliability guarantees, additional poor productivity due to having to learn and master the different vendor solutions and interfaces.
Furthermore, the solutions were not fulfilling some core business requirements such as centralised diary management that is essential for a virtual/remote-based workforce, remote access to clients' contact information, efficient telephone call handling – made difficult by not having a single voicemail box.
solution
Meeting Magic decided to review IT and communications solutions that would meet their business needs, improve productivity and reduce costs. An initial conversation with Vodafone, one of their mobile phone service providers made them aware of a Cloud Computing solution from Microsoft called BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite).
A Microsoft Partner, Pygmalion was contacted to assist in defining the business requirements for email, file/document management & storage, and web conferencing, to submit a proposal that outlined a solution that met their business needs together with a plan to migrate from their existing solutions with minimal/no disruption to business activities, and stating all associated costs.
Meeting Magic decided to implement a solution based on Microsoft’s Cloud BPOS.
Pygmalion implemented the solution with no disruption to existing business activities, and provided the following services:
- Project plan for migration of employees located both in the office and remotely.
- Ensure backups of existing and archived emails.
- Migration of emails stored on the hosted email system.
- The design of a SharePoint portal for document management, clients' contacts management and centralized diary management.
- Migration of contacts from Sage ACT to the SharePoint contacts management solution.
- Provision of end-user manuals and training.
Benefits
- An integrated suite of business applications, providing email, document management and web conferencing, all at Enterprise-class levels of guaranteed availability (99.9%) and performance, with a low monthly subscription cost of £6.71 per user.
- A significant improvement in operating efficiency due for example, to an effective diary management solution, enabling individuals to easily and remotely update their calendars to give clear visibility at all times of their movements and activities.
- Simplified contract/vendor management of IT and communications services, with a single vendor - Vodafone - providing the majority of these services.
- Improvement in the uptime of email services to 99.9% compared to the previous situation with frequent downtime and an inconsistent quality of support.
- Easy access for remote/home workers to core business data and services, which was not previously possible.
company name
Meeting Magic
Industry
Professional Services
Country
United Kingdom
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