Track Training– South Wales
Unlike most companies, Track Training had the majority of its work force field based and a core office based contingent at Head Office dealing with HR, Accounts etc. All field-based staff were utilising a VPN connection to connect to the server based within Head Office. Speeds were terrible, most staff used to give up and use private email addresses, Internet speeds at Head Office were slow because of increased traffic throughout the day. Email would go down daily and servers would need restarting at least once a week.
The impact ForeSee was able to make on this operation was massive. Our main aim was to give the customer 100% up time, increase speeds and increase productivity. By enabling all staff to access Cloud based business grade email, calendar and file management via a SharePoint solution, the customer would be able to standardize all documentation throughout the business.
The customer was prime for migration into a cloud based file management system and hosted Exchange. However what we had to do first was make the connection speeds at the Head Office strong enough with enough resilience so the 20 users at Head Office would have quality access to the Cloud technology. Without this happening we would help the field based workers but shift the problem back to Head Office.
Step One:
2 X EFM Circuit with automatic fail over router installed at Head Office. Connection speeds were guaranteed at 20MB up and down with a 7 hour SLA for break fix.
Once the above was installed, tested and proved we set about migrating the customer into the Cloud for hosted Exchange and SharePoint.
Step Two:
Set up fully hosted, cloud based Exchange for all users and migrate all existing mail into the new profiles. On a Friday evening to minimize disruption the users were migrated across to the new platform. When users returned to work on Monday everything was across and working.
This allowed every user to access work email from any location as long as they had an Internet connection. Field based staff were now able to send and receive email easily. They could use this service on any device such as tablets, phones and laptops. As long as they had an Internet connection from a sim card, customers Wi-Fi etc. they were able to get connected and be productive. All were fully synchronized and head office was able to allocate appointments to diaries and have full visibility of the staff in the field.
Step Three:
Set up the customer SharePoint site.
Change is always greeted with nervousness in any organization so to ensure the success of this project we ran a week of 3-hour training workshops on the customer site and every member of staff were obliged to attend. We gave them instruction on how to work within SharePoint and set the new site up exactly as the customer required it. The customer wanted to take ownership of the site and allocate users and privileges so a number of “power users” were identified and given further training on how to administer the site.
The customer is now able to ensure every member of staff has the latest versions of key documentation by making it available through the SharePoint site.
This customer continues to see the benefits of moving key business critical functions into The Cloud and the 99.9% guaranteed uptime that service enjoys.