Retail Optimization with Office 365
Summary
Domeyer – a leading retailer, service provider and manufacturing company with specialisation in fire protection and safety engineering products – opts for Office 365 for harmonization of company-wide software and for legally compliant archiving of corporate data. The main requirement of the customer to switch to Office 365 was the harmonization of business processes and data. An additional target was to achieve centrally controlled and automated data archiving and continuous monitoring of hardware and software maintenance to reduce IT costs with respect to constant new investments in hard and software.
Field of Business
Domeyer is a leading retailer, service provider and manufacturing company specialising in fire protection and safety engineering products. With its broad technical expertise and almost 100 years of experience, Domeyer is the leading provider of bespoke solutions for all matters related to the protection and safety of personnel and property.
Motivation
The company has grown in recent years, so within the scope of a necessary optimization of business processes and data archiving the management stood before the decision to either invest in an in-house system or to take the step into the Microsoft cloud. A general centralization of project correspondence, data and documents as well as the harmonization of the hard and software should simplify and standardize the daily business.
The heterogeneous IT infrastructure grown over the years with hard and software updates of differently configured computers presented a particular challenge for the in-house IT. An additional problem was the backup and archiving of data on external hard drives. For the data processing, storage and archiving in the company as well as the exchange of documents with customers there were requirements to comply with standards and to ensure that the hardware and software of the IT systems were up-to-date.
Project Realisation
As a basis for the migration of Outlook data Axtrion secured all the existing datasets as PST files. Due to the large amount of data a high-performance network was taken into consideration to transfer local exchange server data to the Exchange Online server. The PST files were, therefore, transmitted over the Axtrion network on virtual machines instances in Microsoft Azure and migrated from there to the Exchange Online server with high network bandwidth (> 50Mbit upstream). With the help of the latest version of Office 2013 that was installed on all workstations, the users could then access their data in the cloud using their computers as well as mobile/smart devices.
For the optimization of data management and archiving Axtrion advised Domeyer to use project specific centralised email storage. In Exchange Online project specific Public Folder were created with a total space of 2.5 TB for a centralized, controlled access authorization to unite the project specific emails thematically and make them available to project stakeholders for the joint management and processing of email correspondence.
Parallel to the technical implementation Axtrion held training and support sessions for the staff during the implementation phase.
Benefits
By using Microsoft Office 365 cloud solution with Exchange Online and Public Folders, Domeyer achieved the following benefits:
- Increased efficiency through process and technology optimisation
- Increased transparency in the project business and communication
- Legally compliant long-term archiving of enterprise data
- Access to corporate data irrespective of the location
- Significant savings in IT costs
- Complete disaster recovery in the cloud
- 99.99% availability of applications and data
