Customer Solution Case Study
/ Move to Hosted Software Suite to Deliver 44 Percent Cost Savings over Three Years
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Manufacturing—High tech
Customer Profile
Wireless Extenders designs, manufactures, and sells cell phone signal boosters for homes, offices, and automobiles. The company has 30 employees and is based in Norcross, Georgia.
Business Situation
Wireless Extenders ran most of its IT infrastructure on one server, which meant that a hardware failure would significantly reduce business productivity. Communication and collaboration were limited, and significant IT effort was required for system administration.
Solution
Wireless Extenders moved to the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite, a hosted messaging and collaboration solution from Microsoft Online Services.
Benefits
· Improved communication, collaboration, and productivity
· Reduced IT effort
· Improved reliability and security
· Responsive local partner
· Cost savings of 44 percent over three years / “As an IT manager, our move to a cloud-based solution has helped me tremendously…. I used to spend 16 hours a week on day-to-day system administration, and now I spend about two hours.”
Carol Dickens, IT Manager, Wireless Extenders
Wireless Extenders is a leading provider of cell phone signal boosters. Prior to July 2010, the company maintained its IT infrastructure primarily on-premises, on a single server. Communication and collaboration tools were limited, yet the server still required significant system administration. Wireless Extenders decided to move to the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite—a hosted communication and collaboration solution that helps companies improve business productivity, without the need to maintain a complex IT infrastructure. With help from InLigo, Wireless Extenders made the move to Business Productivity Online in a weekend—and it is now benefiting from improved communication, collaboration, and productivity; reduced IT effort; improved reliability and security; a 44 percent cost savings over the next three years; and the support of a strong local partner.
Situation
Founded in 2002, Wireless Extenders is a leading provider of cell phone signal boosters for homes, offices, and automobiles. Wireless Extenders was recognized as one of Georgia’s top 10 Innovative Companies in 2006, as a Design and Engineering Awards honoree at the International Consumer Electronics Show in 2007 and 2010, and as a finalist for the Emerging Technologies (E-Tech) award in the Hardware-Mobile Accessory category at CTIA WIRELESS in 2007 and 2010.
Prior to July 2010, Wireless Extenders maintained its IT infrastructure primarily on-premises. The company had a single, three-year-old server running Windows Small Business Server 2003, which, through its combination of the Windows Server 2003 operating system, Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, and Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 technologies, supported email and calendars, network folders, directory services, and a corporate intranet. Wireless Extenders used Google Postini for antivirus and spam filtering, and employees used WebEx for web conferencing.
That IT environment presented several problems, one of which was limited collaboration. Without instant messaging, employees had no easy way of knowing if others were available for impromptu meetings or conversations. This was especially problematic for employees in different locations, including the company’s Georgia headquarters, engineering offices in California and other locations, and remote sales offices. “All of our productivity tools were isolated, which made it very difficult for people to collaborate,” says Carol Dickens, IT Manager at Wireless Extenders.
Employees also found it difficult to use the company’s intranet to collaborate, instead resorting to network folders or email attachments to share files. “Users weren’t trained on how to use the intranet, which wasn’t designed to match their day-to-day business needs,” says Dickens. “It wasn’t user-friendly, so people just didn’t use it.”
The IT environment presented additional complications for Dickens, who spent roughly 40 percent of her time applying software updates, running backups, and performing other routine maintenance tasks that delivered no new business value. The larger issue for her, however, was that all of the company’s vital IT services were hosted on a single system. “I knew that if our one server went down, the business would virtually grind to a halt,” says Dickens. “It’s for that reason that we began to look at cloud-based solutions.”
Dickens’s fears came true on July 28, 2010, when a lightning strike took out the company’s server for two days. Fortunately, she had already contacted InLigo, a member of the Microsoft Partner Network. Over the previous months, InLigo principal Harry Bridger had educated Dickens on the benefits of the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite—a subscription-based, hosted communication and collaboration solution that helps companies improve business productivity, without the need to maintain a complex IT infrastructure. “I called Harry the day the server went down, telling him that we needed to move to Business Productivity Online immediately,” says Dickens.
Solution
Bridger and his team at InLigo made the necessary preparations with Microsoft Online Services while Dickens got her failed server back up and running. InLigo was onsite on Friday, as soon as the latest tape backup for the server had been restored. Bridger and his team used the Microsoft Online Services Directory Synchronization tool to synchronize user accounts, contacts, and groups from the company’s local environment to Microsoft Online Services, and then used the Microsoft Online Services Migration Tools to copy users’ email from the company’s Exchange Server 2003 environment to their new Microsoft Exchange Online mailboxes.
“InLigo had us fully up and running on Business Productivity Online by the end of the weekend,” says Dickens. “We ran in coexistence mode for a week or so to make sure everything was working correctly, and then changed the appropriate record in the Domain Name System to direct all new email to Exchange Online.”
Full-Featured Business Productivity Suite
Dickens chose the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite, a hosted messaging and collaboration solution that includes Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Live Meeting, and Office Communications Online. Wireless Extenders takes advantage of the following functionality in the Business Productivity Online Standard Suite:
· Email and calendar functions. Wireless Extenders now relies on Exchange Online for email services—including spam filtering, antivirus protection, and synchronization with mobile devices. Each user gets 25 gigabytes of online storage. They can access the advanced email, calendaring, contact management, and task management features of Exchange Online through the Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010 messaging and collaboration clients, or they can use Microsoft Outlook Web App to access the same functionality from almost any web browser.
· Document collaboration and workspaces. Following its move to Business Productivity Online, Wireless Extenders had InLigo design and build the company a new corporate intranet, hosted on SharePoint Online. Each department has its own intranet site, which employees use to share and collaborate on documents, maintain version control for shared documents, manage projects and project workflows, post calendar information, and more. Group-level permissions ensure that only members of certain departments have access to sensitive sites and document libraries, such as those containing accounting or human resources data. Default permissions can be further adjusted, down to the individual level if necessary.
· Real-time communication and collaboration. Wireless Extenders employees have access to advanced communications capabilities provided by Microsoft Office Communications Online—including instant messaging and PC-to-PC audio and video calling. With Microsoft Office Live Meeting, employees can hold online meetings with colleagues, customers, and partners in real time and can share documents or collaborate on a virtual whiteboard. Presence information is displayed in Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Web App, and SharePoint Online, providing an intuitive and user-friendly “click to communicate” experience.
· Unified management console. Dickens also uses the Microsoft Online Services Administration Center, an online portal for administering the hosted environment. By using the Administration Center, she can manage services and users, import user accounts, create distribution lists and SharePoint site collections, and submit service requests to Microsoft Online Services Technical Support.
Powerful New Communication and Collaboration Tools
Wireless Extenders employees use the Business Productivity Online Standard Suite to communicate and collaborate in powerful new ways, such as sharing and working together on documents. “By using SharePoint Online, users across the organization can collaborate on documents and track their progress through the collaborative process,” says Dickens. “The Ribbon in SharePoint Online looks the same as it does in Office, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, which has made it very easy for employees to start using all the great collaboration features that SharePoint Online provides.”
Dickens and others at Wireless Extenders also appreciate how the capabilities provided by Business Productivity Online all work together—and work with Microsoft Office desktop applications—to deliver a seamless experience. “People love how they can start an instant messaging session or access documents stored in SharePoint Online from within Outlook,” says Dickens. “They can also instantly communicate and collaborate from within SharePoint Online.”
Wireless Extenders did not have a corporate chat system before, so employees are enjoying the added functionality of instant messaging. Employees also enjoy using video chat, another capability provided by Office Communications Online. “All you need to do is right-click on someone’s name to start a video chat,” says Dickens. “Calling from computer to computer is also very clear, and it provides a great alternative to typing away in an instant messaging session.”
Users also access many of the capabilities provided by the Business Productivity Online Standard Suite on their mobile phones. “The mobile support provided by Business Productivity Online is fantastic,” says Dickens. “We have BlackBerry, iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone 7 devices, and it was easy to configure all of them to access Exchange Online.”
Capabilities provided by Office Live Meeting are also proving useful. “IT personnel use Live Meeting to access user desktops remotely, reducing the need to physically visit users’ PCs to troubleshoot problems,” says Dickens. “Live Meeting is also being used internally between users—especially by people who need to collaborate from different locations.”
Future Plans
Dickens is already planning to make the transition to Microsoft Office 365, the successor to the Business Productivity Online Standard Suite. She is also planning to transition from Salesforce.com to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. “With Office 365 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, we’ll be able to access customer data through already familiar tools, as well,” says Dickens. “The great thing about hosted solutions from Microsoft is that they’re all designed to work together, and to work seamlessly with the same Microsoft desktop applications that we’ve been using for years. And because it's hosted by Microsoft in the cloud, we’ll always be using the latest version.”
Benefits
Transitioning from an on-premises solution to the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite has given Wireless Extenders an easy-to-use yet powerful solution for communication and collaboration, with built-in support for remote and mobile users. The company is also experiencing strong benefits from an IT perspective. The solution requires virtually no administrative effort while delivering superior levels of security and reliability, and is expected to deliver a 44 percent cost savings over the next three years.
Improved Communication, Collaboration, and Productivity
Wireless Extenders employees now have all the tools needed for effective communication and collaboration, and they can access these powerful new capabilities from within the tools and applications they use throughout the day, including Microsoft Outlook, the web, and their mobile phones. “With Business Productivity Online, we’re able to collaborate from anywhere, any place, at any time, which enables everyone to work more efficiently,” says Dickens. “The capabilities provided by Business Productivity Online have improved average employee productivity by at least 10 percent, and we expect that number to grow to 20 percent when we move to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online.”
Reduced IT Effort
The company’s move to Business Productivity Online has yielded even larger productivity gains for Dickens, reducing her system administration workload by approximately 14 hours a week. “As an IT manager, our move to a cloud-based solution has helped me tremendously,” she says. “I no longer need to worry about system maintenance, performing regular backups, maintaining our antivirus and spam filtering tools, and so on. All of that is taken care of for me with Business Productivity Online, leaving me with significantly more time to focus on new value-added projects. I used to spend 16 hours a week on day-to-day system administration, and now I spend about two hours.”
Improved Reliability
Wireless Extenders benefits from the reliability needed to keep its businesses up and running. The Business Productivity Online Standard Suite provides guaranteed 99.9 percent uptime and is backed by a money-back, service-level agreement, with around-the-clock IT-level phone support. Data is continually replicated to Microsoft data centers in different geographic locations, providing an additional level of comfort that the business data that Wireless Extenders depends on will always be available. “We haven’t had a single email outage since we moved to Business Productivity Online,” says Dickens.
Strong Security Features
Wireless Extenders also benefits from strong security features. Microsoft Forefront Online Protection for Exchange is included with Exchange Online, providing multiple filters and virus-scanning engines to help protect from spam, viruses, phishing scams, and other Internet-based threats. Documents uploaded to SharePoint Online are similarly protected—scanned for viruses by Microsoft Forefront Security for SharePoint, which is included with SharePoint Online.
Wireless Extenders can help protect sensitive documents on its new intranet from unauthorized access. “It’s so easy to limit who can view or edit a document in SharePoint online that business users can do it themselves, which means that IT no longer has to step in and manage permissions. We even have our human resources data in SharePoint; it’s protected and I don’t worry about it.”