Johannesburg, 19 Sep 2013
As an auditing firm, De Jager & Kie relies heavily on the functionality of Excel, Outlook and Calendar sharing. When the need arose for the company to upgrade its existing Office suite, it turned to long-term partner ITE Services to assist it in identifying a solution to meet its needs.
Business approach
"Once we had identified that we needed to upgrade our Office suite, we began looking at applications that would meet the specific demands on our business and our users," says Villiers Gorgens, IT Manager at De Jager & Kie.
"After much consideration we settled on the Office 365 for mid-sized business solution because of the ease of access it promised, the price point it was available at, the e-mail backup facilities it offered, as well as its calendar sharing functionality."
The company's IT services partner, ITE Services, has been working closely with distributor partner Comztek in gearing its business up as a cloud-based application and solutions provider, with particular emphasis around competencies on the Microsoft 365 platform. As a result, ITE Services was able to assist De Jager & Kie with its migration to the new platform, the set-up of its environment, and installation of the software across the business.
The entire migration took the company less than three weeks, which included switching the organisation's domains as well as an overhaul and upgrade of all its existing computers. The physical rollout of the Office 365 software took one day.
Business challenges
According to Gorgens, the project was not without challenges, and the business had to upgrade its existing computer systems, as the new software was unable to operate on its ageing architecture. In addition, there were minor issues with its domain servers, but all of this was sorted out within the aforementioned three-week period by ITE Services.
"While we faced some minor challenges along the way, the overall experience we had with ITE Services and Office 365 as a system has been excellent. The main benefits we are reaping from the software is access to Exchange online and the fact that we can sync the information on multiple devices without any real effort, which has been a huge benefit when it comes to the mobility of our organisation," adds Gorgens.
Business benefits
All in all, Gorgens says De Jager & Kie, through the deployment of the new software, has already experienced improved cost savings, productivity gains, enriched access to information, less requirement for onsite support services, and enhanced cost of ownership.
To this end, the company is also experiencing better quality support from its partner, ITE Services, which can now remotely, and across the cloud, support the business' systems and solutions without ever having to visit the physical offices.
To end
While Gorgens says the experience to date with the Office 365 suite has been a seamless transition, there are areas where he sees room for improvement.
"I would most definitely recommend Office 365 to any small business owner; it removes the need to own expensive servers that become outdated very quickly. It also makes the integration of the software with multiple devices extremely easy and effortless; the portability of your devices and accessibility from anywhere is also great," ends Gorgens.
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