Based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, Mark Nikel Professional Corporation is a small law firm that specializes in personal injury claims. As a small firm, it wanted to provide solutions that supported its email and legal case management requirements but did not need much administration. To provide capabilities such as remote access to email, calendars, and case information, it decided on Microsoft Office 365, a cloud-based service that offers web-enabled business productivity, collaboration, and communication tools.
Situation
Established in 1998, Mark Nikel Professional Corporation represents injured clients in personal injury legal cases in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The firm is comprised of Mark Nikel, its founder and lead attorney, a paralegal, and several attorneys who are engaged on a contract basis.
To support clients, employees frequently traveled to hospitals, clients’ homes, and courtrooms to advise clients, gather statements from witnesses, and argue cases. Mark Nikel, Founder and Lead Attorney at Mark Nikel Professional Corporation, says, “The largest challenge for us was remote access and sharing of information. As a lawyer in a small law firm like mine, being able to be out with clients and being able to work away from the office is survival.” The firm’s email and case management solutions were not providing the remote access capabilities that employees needed to stay productive when they were away from the office.
For messaging, the firm used a POP3 email and calendar service that cost CDN$50 (U.S.$50) per month and presented several challenges. Employees found it difficult to synchronize email and calendar information with mobile phones. The POP3 service also had limited functionality for updating calendars and tasks. Because the courts set deadlines for when attorneys can file lawsuits or make motions, calendars changed frequently, and legal professionals had to track updates manually. Additionally, the amount of spam that employees received each day was unmanageable.
To store client and case information, the law firm used Amicus Attorney Small Firm Edition, a third-party legal case management software solution. The software was installed on the law firm’s server and client information was backed up to an external hard drive. Since legal professionals must access legal case information from remote locations like the courthouse, the firm set up a virtual private network (VPN) with a dedicated IP address, but remote performance was slow and unstable. Amicus Attorney worked great when employees accessed it from the office, but poor remote access was affecting productivity and employees’ ability to provide information to clients in a timely manner. The firm expected to spend CDN$1,000 (U.S.$1,000) to upgrade to Amicus Attorney Premium Edition and Amicus Mobile for remote access to case information. In addition to problems with remote access, the firm was also concerned about the security of data, stability of backups, and downtime.
Nikel explains, “I was the IT person, so if something did not work, I had to fix it or pay an IT consultant.” If he was at the courthouse or working from home and the server went down, which happened three or four times a year, he would have to go into the office to restart it, taking time away from important legal business.
Solution
The firm learned about Microsoft Office 365, which brings together trusted business productivity, collaboration, and communications products as cloud-based services. It joined the Microsoft Rapid Deployment Program (RDP) to pilot the solution and address challenges with remote access, security, downtime, and IT administration. Office 365, the next-generation communications and collaboration cloud-based services from Microsoft, combines the familiar Office desktop suite with cloud-based versions of Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online, and Microsoft Lync Online. Nikel says, “The setup of Office 365 was very simple. From the moment we received the invitation, we simply spent one hour getting SharePoint Online and Exchange Online set up. After that it was a matter of migrating the data, which in our case took three or four hours at the most.”
As current users of the latest Microsoft Office suite, Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010, Nikel and his associates were able to seamlessly connect to the communication and collaboration services of Office 365 to provide exceptional legal advice. Nikel says, “The Office applications like Outlook and Word work great with the online services like Exchange Online and SharePoint Online.” By using Office 2010 and Office 365, the firm began to fully benefit from the combined capabilities of the rich client desktop suite and the hosted services of Office 365.
By replacing the POP3 service with Exchange Online, employees can access email, calendars, and contacts from almost anywhere with a mobile phone or a computer with a broadband connection. Nikel says, “With each device—my tablet, a Windows Phone 7, an Android phone, and even my iPad at home—the synchronization works.” Attorneys use tasks and calendars in Microsoft Outlook 2010 to manage schedules of cases and deadlines. The firm also receives less spam and believes the up-to-date antivirus and antispam solutions make email more secure.
With SharePoint Online, the legal professionals can easily access files and case information remotely without logging onto VPN. The firm also decided to switch from Amicus Attorney to Credenza, made by Credenza Software, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. Credenza is an Outlook add-in that captures client and case information and works with SharePoint Online to provide a legal case management solution that attorneys can access from anywhere. The firm can synchronize SharePoint libraries with Outlook 2010 so attorneys can access case-related documents even when working offline. The firm also uses SharePoint Online to host its external website because it’s simple and easy to set up for a small business.
The firm uses the Microsoft OneNote 2010 note-taking program to capture information into an electronic notebook that attorneys can save in SharePoint Online to share with paralegals. With OneNote 2010, author indicators capture who wrote what. Legal professionals frequently research previous cases, and they can copy relevant information into the notebook with a web link to the case. In Outlook 2010, Nikel can send an e-mail message to a OneNote notebook for a specific client. Nikel says, “With OneNote and SharePoint Online, I was able to create shared notebooks to capture research, links to prior cases, maps of accident scenes, medical records, photographs, and contact information related to a case. I can access this information from almost anywhere from my mobile phone with Microsoft OneNote Mobile or with Microsoft OneNote Web App.”
Benefits
By moving to Office 365 hosted services, Nikel has significantly reduced the time he spends on IT issues, strengthened security of data, stabilized backups, and reduced downtime. Attorneys have better remote access to case information. With these advances, the firm has improved client service, reduced IT costs, and increased profitability.
Improved Client Service
The firm has improved the ability to access emails, calendars, contacts, tasks, and legal case information from remote locations with Office 365. Attorneys frequently speak with accident victims in hospitals, and now they can access clients’ case information from a mobile phone. Nikel says, “This puts information at my fingertips, allowing me to make recommendations to clients immediately rather than taking down the situation and then spending time later to make a recommendation.” Attorneys often only have one opportunity to question witnesses, and with easy access to case information, they can ask more pertinent questions to help improve the testimony for clients’ cases.
Nikel himself has redirected time from IT issues to serving clients. “With Office 365, my [IT] role is almost nonexistent. Once it’s set up, it’s working. I need not worry about it and the time is mine to devote to the law practice.” Also with reduced spam and reduced downtime, Nikel can devote more time to client activities.
Reduced IT Costs
With Office 365, Nikel estimated he has reduced IT costs by CDN$3,200 (U.S.$3,200) annually. He expects yearly savings in the following areas:
Saved CDN$1,000 (U.S.$1,000) in IT consulting costs by switching to a Microsoft-hosted environment
Avoided CDN$1,000 (U.S.$1,000) in annual software subscription costs for an upgrade to Amicus Attorney Premium Edition and Mobile Edition
Saved CDN$600 (U.S.$600) in fees to an IT service provider for POP3 email service and external website hosting, because of functionality built into Exchange Online and SharePoint Online.
Saved CDN$600 (U.S.$600) in costs for a dedicated IP address because security is built into the Office 365 solution
Nikel says, “On a per-lawyer basis, my IT costs will be a fraction of what any of the other law firms’ IT costs are. We pay less than $100 per month per lawyer compared to thousands of dollars per lawyer at a large firm.”
Improved Profitability
Nikel expects a significant increase in profitability, supported by the Office 365 deployment. By improving client service, Nikel expects an increase in client referrals and revenue. He has reduced his firm’s IT costs by reducing contractor, software, and other related IT costs. Nikel has also improved efficiency when working remotely. “Office 365 has helped give me back the time I was spending on IT. We’ve been able to increase the volume of work without increasing staff.”
Nikel says, “I used to be a partner at a large firm, where we had IT staff and large budgets. There was no way a small law firm could afford these advanced capabilities like access-from-anywhere. But with Office 365 it makes it possible for a small firm like mine to have these same capabilities without a large IT investment.”
Microsoft Office 365
Microsoft Office 365 brings together cloud versions of our most trusted communications and collaboration products—Microsoft SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and Lync Online—with the latest version of our Office desktop suite and companion web applications for businesses of all sizes.
Office 365 helps save time and money, and it frees up valued resources. Simple to use and easy to administer, it is financially backed by a service level agreement guaranteeing 99 percent reliability. Office 365 features robust security, IT-level phone support, geo-redundancy, disaster recovery, and the business-class privacy controls and standards that you expect from a world-class service provider.
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Law Firm Enhances Courtroom Storytelling, Daily Productivity with Microsoft Surface Pro
"I now have all my Microsoft OneNote notebooks stored on OneDrive for Business, and I can access them from anywhere using my Surface Pro or my phone. It’s really pretty amazing to have my entire office at my fingertips wherever I am." - Brian Prestes: Partner at Bartlit Beck Herman Palenchar & Scott
Bartlit Beck Herman Palenchar & Scott LLP is one of the most successful trial law firms in the United States. To help attorneys tell more compelling stories in the courtroom and be more productive every day, it is deploying Microsoft Surface Pro 3 devices. In a profession where time is money, Bartlit Beck attorneys use the Surface Pro 3 to save time throughout the day, be more effective in court, and operate cost-effectively.
Be More Effective In Court and Out
Storytelling is not only important in Hollywood; it’s important in the courtroom, too.
No one has perfected the art of courtroom storytelling like Bartlit Beck Herman Palenchar & Scott LLP. Known as Bartlit Beck, the law firm specializes in complex courtroom litigation. It has achieved an enviable record of courtroom victories in high-profile cases of all kinds, including antitrust, class action, intellectual property, product liability, fraud, and securities.
To help its attorneys tell more compelling stories, and to help them be more productive and effective during workdays that extend well beyond typical office hours, Bartlit Beck is giving interested attorneys Microsoft Surface Pro 3 devices.
Use Technology Effectively
Bartlit Beck has always used technology to maximum effect. An early adopter of the alternative fee model, which rewards the firm according to results rather than hourly billing, Bartlit Beck aims to do superior work with fewer lawyers and layers in less time. Smart use of technology facilitates this efficiency.
“We encourage our attorneys to use the technology tools that make them most efficient,” says Alexandra Buck, Chief Operating Officer and Special Counsel at Bartlit Beck. “We pioneered the use of trial presentation software, and we continually test new technologies that help us present our arguments as clearly and persuasively as possible.”
Most of the firm’s 77 attorneys used thin and light laptops but still found them too heavy and clunky for their on-the-go lifestyles. They took too long to turn on and shut down, which attorneys did multiple times a day as they moved between offices, meetings, homes, airports, airplanes, and customer sites.
“I would take my laptop into a meeting, fire it up, go get coffee, have a hallway chat, come back, and it would still be loading,” Buck says. “That wasted time adds up throughout the day.”
Brian Prestes, a partner at Bartlit Beck, shared Buck’s frustrations. “I really wanted a tablet to make it easier to do all my reading, but I didn’t want to juggle multiple devices. From a lifestyle standpoint, I wanted a device that I could pick up and put down frequently to check email, play music, read a brief, and chat with my family via Skype, all more fluidly than I could with a laptop. I also travel constantly, and I found it increasingly difficult to have enough space on an airplane to open a laptop.”
Tell More Compelling Stories
In the spirit of staying current with new technology, several attorneys acquired an earlier version of Surface Pro, and the firm got hooked. “No one here likes to be left behind!” Buck says. The number of devices continued to grow, and the firm expects to have nearly 40 Surface Pro 3 device users by the end of the year.
With their Surface Pro 3 devices, lawyers have immediate access to all pretrial discovery materials, deposition testimony, legal analysis, and everything else related to the case, which can be sorted and analyzed instantaneously. “This gives us a tremendous advantage over firms that may have access to similar information but that require layers of support to access, manipulate, and present it in court,” Buck says.
Using a combination of touch, the Surface Pen, and Type Cover, lawyers can quickly move around within a document, highlight or underline language, or otherwise manipulate presentations with total ease. “With the Surface Pro 3, our attorneys can more flexibly control their stories in the courtroom, which gives more authenticity and credibility to our presentations,” Buck says.
Make Every Minute Count
Apart from courtroom effectiveness, attorneys use their Surface Pro 3 devices to be more productive every day. “The main advantage of the Surface Pro 3 over a laptop is in the transition points—the startup and shutdown times that happen throughout the day,” says Buck. “The Surface Pro 3 is blazingly fast. This time saving adds up throughout the day and week.”
Prestes loves the “lapability” of the Surface Pro 3—the ability to use it comfortably on his lap, on an airplane tray, or in other tight quarters. “After using my Surface Pro 3, I can say that it has delivered on the promise of being the tablet that can replace my laptop,” he says. “I can set up shop and be productive anywhere, in small slivers of time. If I only have five minutes, I can check my email and respond to questions, whereas before I lost that time.”
With its practice of results-based billing, Bartlit Beck prizes efficiency—thus its penchant for technology. “Our bread and butter is being efficient,” says Buck. “The Surface helps us do the best possible work in the least amount of time.”
Bartlit Beck uses Microsoft Office 365 to give employees access to cloud-based email, instant messaging, videoconferencing, productivity applications, and more. Prestes and others say that the combination of the Surface Pro 3 and Office 365 is a powerful productivity enhancer. “I now have all my Microsoft OneNote notebooks stored on OneDrive for Business, and I can access them from anywhere using my Surface Pro or my phone,” Prestes says. “It’s really pretty amazing to have my entire office at my fingertips wherever I am.”
Save Money, Too
While many Bartlit Beck attorneys use Apple Mac computers, Thomas Mensch, IT Director at Bartlit Beck, says the Surface Pro is more cost-effective. “The Macs are about $1,000 more expensive for each user, because the Mac hardware is more expensive and doesn’t run our legal software, so we have to install a virtual machine that can run Windows,” he says. “I think the Surface is a great addition from Microsoft; it’s a complete computer in a little box.”
"After using my Surface Pro 3, I can say that it has delivered on the promise of being the tablet that can replace my laptop. I can set up shop and be productive anywhere, in small slivers of time." - Brian Prestes: Partner at Bartlit Beck Herman Palenchar & Scott
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Climbing 50 Peaks in 50 Days, Powered by Microsoft Technology
Melissa Arnot returns from record Everest climb to help protégé tackle 50 Peaks Challenge
In May, Melissa Arnot became the first American woman to successfully climb Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen. A month earlier, her good friend and business manager in Seattle, Christine Hass, had a baby.
After such life-changing feats, you might think the two of them would want a leisurely summer. Maybe hang out at the pool and do a little less after summiting 29,028 feet in brutal conditions on dangerously thin mountain air, or caring for a newborn day and night after giving birth.
But you’d be wrong. Instead, the women are now helping Arnot’s climbing protégé, Maddie Miller, tackle a new adventure called the 50 Peaks Challenge, which involves climbing the highest point in all 50 U.S. states in 50 days.
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With Microsoft Band, Skype, Office and Surface empowering their journey, Arnot and Miller are now on a cross-country race against the clock in a camper van named “Tiffany,” with Hass providing support from her home office in Seattle. The epic road trip and expedition kicked off on June 27 when Miller summited 20,308-foot Denali in Alaska. She then flew to Florida to join Arnot, who sustained a cold-related foot injury on Everest and skipped Denali to recover and finalize logistics.
After quickly reworking their plans – part of their nimble nature in the business — the pair is now heading north and west, before flying to Hawaii for a final hike up Mauna Kea in Hawaii. If they’re successful, Miller will be the first woman to complete the challenge.
For the trio, 50 Peaks is less about mountaineering and more about a powerful team working together to achieve goals, share a joy for adventure, and inspire others to accomplish great things. It’s a chance for Arnot, a renowned professional climbing guide, to mentor a younger athlete and share her vast mountaineering experience, which began at 19. She had quit an ad-writing job in Iowa, drove west and lived out of her truck to climb mountains.
“This year is really a year of mentorship, and it’s pretty special. It’s the most responsibility I’ve ever had in terms of teaching and caring for people,” says Arnot, who started her climbing business seven years ago. Earning success in a male-dominated industry, Arnot has summited Everest six times, led expeditions on three continents and climbed to the top of Mount Rainier more than a hundred times.
She has also supported others. This year, she guided a 13-year-old girl on climbs in Nepal for six weeks. She worked on her non-profit organization, The Juniper Fund, which helps families of Sherpas killed on Everest. And she’s been preparing Miller for 50 Peaks, on everything from gear to workouts to mental stamina. The two met in 2013, when Arnot guided Miller on a climb up Rainier as part of Miller’s high school graduation gift from her dad.
“It’s been teaching her the skills to be technically ready, but also the skills to have the confidence in herself that she can do this,” Arnot says of 50 Peaks, which includes technical climbs, shorter hikes and six summits in a single day.
For Miller, the challenge is an opportunity to learn mountaineering and life skills from a thriving entrepreneur and world-class climber.
“Melissa is a really important person in my life, not just for guiding me up mountains,” says Miller, a 21-year-old Colorado College senior majoring in mathematical economics. “She’s taught me that women can achieve so much, and do so much, and there’s no limitation.”
The essential, behind-the-scenes glue and magic of Arnot’s business, Infinity Expeditions, belongs to Hass, the group’s go-to, get-it-done executor. As an efficiency expert and administrative director of another company that specializes in wilderness medical care, Hass manages details and logistics. She deals with sponsors, clients, insurance, flights, budgets, media and Arnot’s many speaking engagements. She’s the doer to Arnot’s thinker and climber; when Arnot suggests a raffle to sell the van after 50 Peaks, Hass is thinking of three ways to accomplish it.
“I love being able to support [Arnot] and find success in making the business successful,” says Hass. “It is efficiency, the making things happen, the completion of a project.”
The pair has developed a winning formula for running a business, with Microsoft technology playing a major role. To train for Everest and other climbs — and encourage clients on their workouts — Arnot uses Microsoft Band, which tracks heart rate, mileage and elevation.
Because she works remotely much of the time, she and Hass need seamless tools to keep in touch, scale the business and collaborate efficiently from different parts of the world. For that, they turned to Microsoft’s cloud and Skype for Business, which enables dial-in access (handy for calling in from a big mountain). They save, share and edit emergency plans, the 50 Peaks schedule and other important content in OneNote. And they use Office Lens to scan receipts and avoid the end-of-trip headache of paper piles.
Everything is done on the light-weight, high-performance Surface Pro 4 — particularly useful when Arnot is 17,600 feet in the air at Everest’s base camp, where every ounce counts.
“Using a lot of different pieces of technology to keep us all connected is probably one of the biggest things that’s helpful for me,” Hass says of 50 Peaks.
The adventure is the latest in a series of expeditions marked by both elation and tragedy, including the 2010 death of one of Arnot’s climbing partners, the devastating 2015 earthquake in Nepal and two years of deadly avalanches on Everest.
Through it all, the women have supported each other in an extreme sport that’s often nomadic, isolating and tough on friendships. After the deaths, Arnot returned to the U.S. each time to grieve in Hass’ home. After Hass became a new mom this year, she Skyped Arnot in Nepal to introduce her newborn daughter. They’ve been able to bridge distance and time zones through technology.
“When we were both 20-something-years-old and started this friendship and business together, I never could have imagined that this would be our lives,” says Arnot. As she reviewed her itinerary and massive amounts of gear with Hass in the final days before 50 Peaks, she was grateful for the support.
“Getting ready for this huge challenge of climbing 50 peaks in 50 days, I know that there’s no way I could have done that without Christine,” Arnot says. “We’re stronger together.”
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Carvajal switches to Office 365 for faster business, reduced cost
Keep business information both accessible and safe—a challenge in any scenario, but especially difficult when you operate myriad business divisions in 15 countries. That’s what we face at Carvajal, where our divisions produce everything from office furniture and educational software to commercial printing and packaging. We also strive to make our large, diverse company operate as a cohesive organization. It can be tough to coordinate meetings and collaborate among 20,000 employees in so many different divisions dispersed throughout South and North America.
A few years ago, we decided to standardize our technology environment to make it easier to reach across geographic and divisional borders and unite our workforce. For example, we needed to consolidate all the different communications systems we’d been supporting and establish a more stable email infrastructure that would help us reduce hardware and administration costs. So we moved from our range of on-premises software to Google Apps.
But we soon found that employees had to take extra steps to accomplish their work. This was due to the lack of integration between our Google solutions and our Microsoft systems, particularly Microsoft Office, which employees depend on for daily productivity. For example, employees encountered issues when they tried to publish documents because their formatting didn’t stay consistent, and they struggled to find ways to collaborate efficiently. We knew we needed to make a change, and in 2015, we chose to migrate to Microsoft Office 365 and completed our migration successfully with help from Microsoft Services Premier Support.
Switching from Google Apps to Office 365 has been a savvy move for Carvajal. We saw right away how much easier it is now for employees everywhere to share information and work together using any device. We’re implementing workflow processes in Microsoft SharePoint Online and taking advantage of Office 365 Groups to help us streamline our operations even further. And it doesn’t matter whether employees are working from an office or hotel, a smartphone or a traditional computer—they stay productive no matter what. Plus, our employees are happy to be back using Microsoft Outlook, which is where they’re most comfortable working. The best part is that everything interoperates in a way that supports connected teamwork.
There are plenty of reasons why we’re pleased that we adopted Office 365, most of which relate to companywide collaboration and efficiency. We appreciate that now we’re able to extend the number of attendees on our video calls using Skype for Business, because greater employee input gives us the opportunity to make more informed decisions. We also plan to expand use of our Yammer corporate social network to make it simple for all our business divisions to share best practices, comment on projects and tap into the company’s full knowledge base for fast answers to problems.
Our IT staff members are as happy with Office 365 as their colleagues. For example, they spend far less time now on hardware and software administration, focusing instead on new projects that support the business. The company also benefits from having more secure data in an environment that complies with important international standards. That’s significant to us because we operate in so many industries in which it’s critical to adhere to regulations, and we count on Microsoft to help keep us protected and compliant.
We’re making it easier for employees to communicate with each other and collaborate on a huge array of projects. Ultimately, that helps us develop products quicker and be more responsive to our customers and their needs. That’s smart business.
Managed Solution is a full-service technology firm that empowers business by delivering, maintaining and forecasting the technologies they’ll need to stay competitive in their market place. Founded in 2002, the company quickly grew into a market leader and is recognized as one of the fastest growing IT Companies in Southern California.
We specialize in providing full Microsoft solutions to businesses of every size, industry, and need.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
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Democratizing data— Atkins goes digital by default with Office 365 E5
We’ve determined that we want Atkins to be “digital by default.” For me, that’s not just about using technology to bring people and information together, it’s about flexible experimentation at a rapid pace.
As an important part of our strategy, we’ve invested in the latest and most comprehensive version of Microsoft Office 365, the E5 suite, to give employees new ways to serve themselves and make faster, better decisions. Multiple benefits captured our attention, but I’m most eager to adopt Microsoft Power BI. We see it as the heart of our efforts to break down silos, unlock our core corporate data and enhance personal effectiveness.
Atkins has a history of delivering innovative answers to complex engineering problems, from designing the world’s longest driverless subway in Dubai to transforming the offshore wind energy industry to international airport modernization. We’re infusing every part of our company with that same spirit of innovation, which is no small feat for a global organization. We’ve got to think about global collaboration and choose technology systems that work everywhere in the world, tools that make it easy for people to share information and connect with each other. We can’t take months to provide employees with new capabilities—we need to be able to get them up and running.
My colleagues want a 360-degree, single, integrated view of the business and the ability to consume that data proactively without waiting for another report to be created. Using Power BI, individual employees have self-service access to intelligence that they can slice and dice in whatever ways are most helpful to them. They also have an easy way to view and share their insights through interactive visualizations. I’m a great believer in democratized capabilities across the organization, and enabling employees to access and experiment with data ties directly to our emphasis on innovation.
Increasing our ability to be data driven also helps us act faster by taking advantage of existing resources and expertise. Giving our entire workforce access to Power BI unlocks the full potential of the whole company and helps enable the agile new world we’re creating.
There are many other aspects of Office 365 that help us move faster and give us the business agility we’re looking for. For example, we use our Yammer enterprise social network to crowdsource solutions to client issues, come up with ideas for hackathons and engage diverse groups in conversations about using innovative technology to create value for our employees and clients alike.
Also, through E5, we’re extending our use of Skype for Business, making it our single solution for voice, video, conferencing and instant messaging. Moving to complete cloud-based communications gives us obvious benefits in terms of cost savings and less equipment on people’s desks. Plus, we’ll continue to gain benefits as Microsoft adds new features to the platform over time. There’s also real value in using the full capabilities of Skype for Business because it supports true mobility. Atkins has many consultants who spend a lot of time on the road. They love using Skype for Business to stay productive and effective wherever they might be in the world.
In fact, Office 365 will have a transformational impact on the way all sorts of employees work at Atkins—they no longer need to be at a desk or even in an office. They go to Office 365 to connect with colleagues and clients and bring new insights to the work we do. They tap into our innovation hubs, client communities, winning work communities and business change leaders network. And they use Microsoft SharePoint Online to set up team sites quickly for collaboration across borders, and they share information with Microsoft OneDrive for Business.
Our vision is to move the company completely to the cloud by 2020, allowing us to decommission on-premises infrastructure and concentrate our creative energy in the spaces where we can truly differentiate Atkins from the rest of the market. Using Office 365 helps us harness our collective knowledge and experience, combine it with some of our clients’ knowledge and experience, and develop innovative, successful solutions in a fraction of the time it would have taken before. I’m excited about the future at Atkins and our relationship with Microsoft and Office 365. We look forward to the ongoing benefits of using a product that’s continually evolving and adding value to what we do, just like we do for our clients.
Managed Solution is a full-service technology firm that empowers business by delivering, maintaining and forecasting the technologies they’ll need to stay competitive in their market place. Founded in 2002, the company quickly grew into a market leader and is recognized as one of the fastest growing IT Companies in Southern California.
We specialize in providing full Microsoft solutions to businesses of every size, industry, and need.
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Trustworthy Cloud Logistics For First Responders – Resgrid
Developer by day, volunteer firefighter by night . . . Shawn Jackson likes making a difference in the world. Now, as founder of BizSpark startup Resgrid, he is helping speed up disaster emergency responses in a bid to keep people safer around the globe.
When a call crackles across a fire emergency response system, first responders rush to their station, grab their gear and get to the scene as quickly as possible. As they drive, though, it’s tough for everyone to know who else is responding or what their own role will be.
“It’s hard to put together the best crew for the situation without knowing who is responding from where and what level each person can operate at,” says Jackson. “Am I going to be the guy kicking in the door or driving the truck?”
The developer side of Jackson’s brain started swirling with ideas to resolve the communications issue. He came up with the concept of Resgrid, a cloud/app combination that first responders can use from their mobile devices to coordinate logistics and resource management. Smartphones and tablets, he reasoned, were owned by nearly every first responder – why not create a universal product for mobile networks that can receive text messages?
He enlisted help from another developer he knew well – Jason Jarret – and, together, they chose to build out the idea using Microsoft technologies – particularly Microsoft Azure – as the foundation. The Microsoft BizSpark program gave them free access to lots of Microsoft software, including Azure.
“Every country has first responder needs and at varying levels of sophistication,” says Jackson. “With Azure we can coordinate all the information we need to help any first responder – anywhere – track operations and even obtain turn-by-turn directions to get to the emergency scene.”
Resgrid uses the cloud platform to deploy its entire product, from the company website to its backend API and everything in between, says Jarret, in large part because it seamlessly connects with any open source software (OSS) package Resgrid uses.
“Our system was designed to work with Azure from the onset,” says Jarrett, co-founder, “because it allows us to leverage all the capabilities of the platform. For example, we use Cloud Services for both Web and Worker roles to help us identify patterns and reoccurrences. Our backend is Azure SQL Database. That gives us SQL as a service that we do not have to manage or failover.”
Azure SQL Database uses a special version of Microsoft SQL Server as its backend. It provides high availability by managing many databases, storing multiple copies of databases, elastic scale and rapid provisioning.
Resgrid’s use of OSS packages in conjunction with Azure is substantial. MongoDB, for example, lets Resgrid integrate real-time analytics into its Azure operational databases. The startup also uses TeamCity CI – a Java-based platform – as a build server and runs it on an Azure virtual machine. AngularJS and Bootstrap, open source web application frameworks, are being used with Azure Websites (a fully-managed Platform as a Service) for the startup’s web site. StackExchange.Redis lets Resgrid connect to the Azure Redis Cache through a .NET API, allowing the startup to create and configure a cache, add or remove objects from it and configure cache clients.
Other, smaller OSS packages include Moment.js, which lets Resgrid display times and dates on its Azure-based dashboard, and jQuery, a cross-browser JavaScript library that simplifies client-side scripting of HTML. For instance, coding with jQuery lets Resgrid quickly add special effects to its web site and pull data from a server-side database.
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United Airlines Uses Azure Site Recovery to Build a Disaster Recovery Solution
To address the need for an enterprise-ready disaster recovery solution, in June 2013 United Airlines joined the Rapid Deployment Program (RDP) for Windows Server 2012 R2. “Now that we are more virtualized, we are looking at a whole new approach to DR, where flexibility and cloud computing combine to provide a resilient solution that we can tailor to meet our needs,” says Wilson. “It made sense to continue on our cloud journey with a Microsoft DR solution.”
Hyper-V Replica offers a data replication solution that replicates virtual machines within a site or to a remote site. The latest version of Hyper-V Replica provides the flexibility that United is looking for, with variable replication frequency—from 30 seconds up to 15 minutes—and support for extended replication to a third site. And the new DR management service, Microsoft Azure Site Recovery, answers the airline’s need for a highly available DR solution because it is delivered as a cloud service running in the Microsoft Azure environment. Azure Site Recovery offers orchestration at scale delivered via recovery plans, so United IT staff can bring up applications in a desired manner at a low recovery time objective. While Azure Site Recovery is a feature of Windows Server 2012 R2, it supports backwards compatibility with all versions of Hyper-V Replica.
With Azure Site Recovery:
Safeguard complex workloads against outages
Support heterogenous environments (including Hyper-V)
Leverage computer resources
Reduce infrastructure costs by migrating workloads to Azure
Using Azure as a destination for disaster recovery eliminates the cost and complexity maintaining a secondary site, and replicated data is stored in Azure Storage, with all the resilience that provides. Site Recovery provides test failovers to support disaster recovery drills without affecting production environments. You can also run planned failovers with a zero-data loss for expected outages, or unplanned failovers with minimal data loss (depending on replication frequency) for unexpected disasters. After failover you can failback to your primary sites. Site Recovery provides recovery plans that can include scripts and Azure automation workbooks so that you can customize failover and recovery of multi-tier applications.
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