Sometimes companies continue to use software that they’ve long outgrown, simply because that’s the way they’ve always done it, or because the number of computers deployed or custom programs installed. A large pharmaceutical company client had been using Lotus Notes for messaging. When the majority of their laptops needed a technology refresh they took a fresh look at support costs, future needs of a mobile workforce, implementation costs and decided to migrate to Office 365.
We stepped in as a technology advisor and a project manager controlling multiple vendors for training deployment, Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, ensuring the project would wrap within a reasonable timeframe and with an equally-impressive end result. This was a global deployment.
Here’s how we did it:
- The first step was to create a project plan and a communication and training plan; this one-two approach would deliver the systems they needed and ensure everyone who need to use it would know how.
- We then implemented a single-sign on with the existing Active Directory infrastructure
- At this point it was time to deploy Office 365 worldwide, which we achieved in less than eighteen months.
- Additional work the client will take on is implementation of SharePoint Online and upgrades to their existing SharePoint infrastructure.
- Managed resources, and reported on $6M budget…project completed on-time
After the project wrapped our client realized they now had the functionality and benefits they needed:
- Messaging and office applications were reduced to a variable cost model
- Total cost of ownership was now less than that of the previous office infrastructure
- Upon project completion, our client had a scalable collaboration system that spanned the globe and allowed quick meetings. This also satisfied the requirement to make the cost of collaboration resilient and variable in cost.