Every business is busy - creating unavoidable opportunities for mistakes. Many departments can get overlooked, including IT. The problem is, even if you don't quite realize it, your IT department is the very foundation of your entire business. All your company data, communication tools, and service platforms are reliant on a sturdy IT department.
IT departments can be tricky, with a lot of difficulty in hiring the right people and avoiding turnover. That's where a Managed Services Provider (MSP) comes in. Whether you completely outsource your IT department, or simply collaborate and combine your IT with an MSP, having managed services can completely transform your business, without a lot of work on your end.
Worry-free Reliability
A managed services provider will never leave you in times of need. With an outside IT department, there will always be an IT professional available to help manage your business needs. No need to worry about who will take over while your only IT guy is on a week-long cruise in Hawaii.
Growing Expertise
An MSP has IT professionals with incredible experience. Working with multiple clients and industries, you can be sure they have dealt with the latest technology and the best practices for each different business. Having an experienced professional working with your business can allow you to make knowledgeable decisions about your software and hardware, as well as other business practices and techniques.
Reduce Risk
If an individual employee has complete access to your IT, but ends up not working out, are you sure they won't create problems with your IT when they leave? An MSP allows you to have more than just one or a few individuals manning your company data, meaning you can protect your company no matter who stays or goes. Reduce the risk of company damage by using an outside IT department to protect your company.
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 managed services to businesses of every size, industry, and need.
Learn more about managed services provided by Managed Solution
At Hendrick Motorsports, we look at IT as a competitive advantage. And it’s my job to support the company’s goals with the right technology. When Mr. Hendrick says he wants everyone—pit crews, engineers, accountants, mechanics—to work together to win NASCAR championships, we use Microsoft Teams to achieve that goal.
Most fans watching a race think it’s all about the car and the driver. But behind that combination is a ton of data, and the real question becomes how quickly we can consume and act on information to make race-winning decisions that give us a competitive edge. At the track, there’s not only adrenaline, but there’s a lot of noise, power issues and radio interference—so a lot of this collaboration has to be text driven. The persistent chat-based workspaces we get with Microsoft Teams are perfect on pit road.
In Talladega, Alabama, we have to make race strategy decisions for two of our cars. If we have a long green flag stint, when do we stop each car and take on gas and tires? The people on top of the pit box for both car crews use laptops running Windows 10 and Microsoft Teams to communicate so we don’t lose time due to a single car drag coefficient. And we can do that all without breaking radio silence, so we are not giving away secrets to the other competitors. Unlike most organizations that are separated from their competition across the city or the country, our competition is within feet of us, week in, week out. Microsoft Teams is based on the security features built into Office 365 and Windows 10, and that’s critical to keeping our competitive advantage.
Nowadays we have live radar on top of the pit box, and if we see a rainstorm coming, we get that information into Teams and chat about stopping before the race is halfway over. The reason being if the rain holds off until the race goes beyond the halfway mark, then it’s an official race, and we want to run it as if it’s not going to be canceled. Before Teams, we would send runners back and forth to a central radar location.
The communication that goes on during a race extends from the pit box to the people sitting in our transporters in the garage area to our complex in Concord, North Carolina. We have race engineers and crew chiefs devoted to individual car teams along pit road collaborating in Teams workspaces and making decisions that are relayed directly into the ears of the driver.
Then you have the crew members entering data into Teams, such as tire wear information, miles per gallon and how much fuel got added to a car. Race engineers and team managers back in the transporters watch the event, monitor communication and relay that information via Teams, straight to our personnel.
Back in Concord, there are people in the shop or conference rooms all signed in to Teams workspaces. They monitor the race to record events that the people at the track might miss in the moment. We use this to compile valuable historical data that we review later to make decisions for future races.
Everywhere you look, Hendrick Motorsports is using Microsoft Teams to fulfill Mr. Hendrick’s vision. We’re bringing the company together to help produce winning results.
Collaborate on Files From Anywhere
As written on products.office.com
Store, sync, and share files simply
Always have the latest version of files
Having your files stored online makes it easy to store, organize, and share them, so you can work on documents with teammates, share reports with business partners, or connect with customers. Your files are always up to date, so everyone has access to the latest version.
Get room for all your files
With 1 TB of personal document storage, you can store all your files online and access them anywhere from your PC/Mac or your iOS, Android™, or Windows device.
Share with anyone you choose
You can share files inside and outside your company. You always control access.
Share internally and externally
You control access to files
In our networked world, file sharing isn’t restricted to inside the office. But inside or out, you control who sees and edits each file. And you can create, edit, and review with others to avoid back-and-forth hassles and save time in the process.
Work together on the same file
No more emailing documents around and losing track of the latest version. Easily add, respond to, and track comments and status updates on one version of the document.
The power of social networking
Social networking enhances collaboration and sparks innovation. Get updates on documents and sites delivered automatically.
Keep your projects coordinated
Help teams stay in sync
Keep everyone up to date and working together as a team. Office 365 gives you many different ways to help ensure that everyone can find exactly the files they need fast and that all team members are moving forward together.
Build a team library
Keep project emails and shared documents together in one place with a project-specific mailbox only team members can access, so no time is wasted searching for what you need.
Create a team site
You control access to your team site. And with automatic policies, rights protection, and archiving, you can safeguard your team assets.
New blog launches: Microsoft AppSource, your destination for SaaS business apps
For anyone interested in creating, consuming or providing services for SaaS business apps on the Microsoft Cloud platform, Microsoft AppSource is the place to go.
AppSource is Microsoft’s answer to a longstanding market need to connect business customers with SaaS apps and integration services, and it’s already become a thriving ecosystem that gives business users one place to discover and trial apps built on the Microsoft Cloud platform, with implementation help from Microsoft partners.
To provide more information about AppSource and its growing collection of apps, ISVs, systems integrators and customers, the team is adding another dimension to the service this week — launching a new blog. The blog will feature resources to help participants get the most from AppSource, along with the stories behind the apps and how they’re bringing more value to customers.
Since the launch of AppSource in July, business users from all over the world have visited to check out the service. ISVs are submitting new apps every day, and already more than 100 systems integrator partners have come onboard to help customers implement them.
The new blog adds a forum to share information and stories as this resource continues to grow. It’s also a blog you’ll probably want to bookmark — with so much going on, we’re sure AppSource is going to have a lot to share in the near future.
Mediterranean Shipping Company builds a global productivity network with Office 365
The Mediterranean Shipping Company has been under the same family leadership since its inception 43 years ago, and while the company now manages its fleet of 480 vessels from offices in 150 countries, it’s fair to say that its caring, corporate culture is as strong today as it ever was. But while we all feel connected to a large corporate family, unfortunately, our IT systems did not support that connectivity, or the global communications that we needed to compete in today’s digital economy.
Container shipping has evolved over the years to become a commodity-based business. Today, we are facing an era of shrinking profit margins and a growing pressure on the revenue side. Yet we were able to ensure that IT played its part in minimizing operational expenses, while improving our business services to employees. That’s because Office 365 delivers a cost-effective, cloud-based solution to bring everybody up to the same level of mobility and productivity across our global operations.
When I became CTO in 2005, we wanted to replace the disparate business productivity solutions we had running in 480 offices around the world with a single digital workplace for everyone. After evaluating other web-based solutions, including Google Apps for Business (now G Suite) and Amazon Web Services, we chose Office 365 cloud-based communication and collaboration services to empower all employees with the same leading-edge, yet familiar business tools. Security also played into this decision: we had various security solutions in place across our global offices, and it took a tremendous effort to ensure that everyone achieved an acceptable standard of security practices. The beauty of Office 365 is that we are deploying Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection as a single security control for all our offices. This service addresses the latest attacks that can invade a network through email attachments or embedded links. In the end, we benefit from the Office 365 constant update model and uniformity of service, plus the added bonus that Microsoft takes care of running the service in the cloud on dedicated hardware.
Today, we use Office 365 to boost mobility and productivity to differentiate our personal service from that of our competitors. The faster we share information and collaborate on behalf of our customers, the more responsive our service. This was a significant challenge before, with so many different solutions in place around the world. Now our employees access their files anywhere from online storage, IM colleagues for quick answers to questions, or spontaneously invite their team members to a video conference. When we have the same easy connectivity across the hall, or around the world, we can make good on our promise to provide global service with local knowledge. And now that regional managers are benefitting from easy-to-use data analytics and dashboard tools to decide what’s best for their customers, we can provide more informed local service.
Mobility is especially important to enable the flexible service our customers have come to expect. Today, our employees are no longer bound to a specific device. Now that people can be more productive on their own terms, we expect efficient turnaround of information among colleagues and with our customers.
Microsoft Consulting Services was invaluable in the deployment of Office 365—it complemented our small, yet nimble IT team and helped us transform how the company works on a daily basis. Despite the variety of legacy environments in place across our offices, we achieved the migration in just nine months. And with our recent subscription to add 17,000 seats of Office 365 E5, we expect a similar rapid adoption of the latest advances in cloud telephony and Office Delve, which delivers personalized content from all your Office 365 apps. At the end of the day, providing a rewarding workplace with a state-of-the-art business productivity platform reaffirms our corporate culture of encouraging long-term employees in a supportive environment—and also gives us a competitive edge where we can work leaner and more efficiently to preserve our profit margins. That’s great business value!
Craft Brewer Reduces Costs and Increases Availability with Hosted Messaging Solution
New Belgium Brewing is the third-largest craft brewery in the United States. Founded in Fort Collins, Colorado in 1991, the brewery produces 29 varieties of beer and distributes across 26 states. About 1/3 of the company’s nearly 400 employees work at remote locations, so New Belgium deployed a Microsoft Unified Communications solution to ensure that employees have the latest capabilities without sacrificing reliable, available service.
Situation
New Belgium Brewing was founded in Fort Collins, Colorado, in 1991 by husband and wife team Jeff Lebesch and Kim Jordan after Lebesch traveled through Belgium on a brewery tour and came home inspired. He named the company’s flagship beer, Fat Tire, for the fat tires on the mountain bike he rode to tour the European villages that inspired him to begin brewing beer. Employee owned, New Belgium Brewing emphasizes ecologically friendly practices. Today it is the third-largest craft brewer in the United States. New Belgium produces 29 varieties and more than half a million barrels of beer per year, which is distributed across 26 states.
Of its 385 employees, about one-third work at locations across the United States as sales people, field quality specialists, and event coordinators. New Belgium relies heavily on a Microsoft unified communications solution to keep its workforce connected. For messaging, it recently upgraded to Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 on-premises, and it uses a third-party product for spam filtering. It also deployed Exchange Unified Messaging so that employees can receive and manage both voice mail and e-mail messages in a unified inbox.
New Belgium also recently upgraded its collaboration and document management solution to Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. Its company intranet, known as “the Mothernet,” is built on SharePoint Server technology. Through the Mothernet, employees can access company information, project sites, cross-team sites, document libraries, and company wikis. They can also collaborate on projects and documents in real time.
For communications, New Belgium plans to upgrade to Microsoft Lync Server 2010, which provides enhanced versions of the communications capabilities provided by Office Communications Server 2007 R2—presence, instant messaging, robust conferencing, and enterprise voice—in addition to improvements in topology, deployment, and management tools. It also plans to use Lync enterprise voice as its primary voice solution. “We have used some version of Microsoft enterprise voice since Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007,” says Travis Morrison, Senior Systems Administrator at New Belgium Brewing. “We had it connected to our Cisco Call Manager. With Lync Server, we plan to retire our private-branch exchange telephony system and use Lync enterprise voice.”
Although New Belgium was happy with the way its unified communications solution helped to keep employees connected to each other, it still saw room for improvement in the areas of availability, storage, and reliability for its messaging solution. Some employees who work in production do not have dedicated computers to access email; New Belgium wanted to provide an easier way for them to manage email. Employees who use email on a daily basis have mailboxes with a size limit of about 7 gigabytes (GB), and as the company grows, its messaging solution requires more storage on its storage area network (SAN). Finally, New Belgium wanted to ensure that its remote employees could always access email, even in the event that the corporate servers were unavailable.
Solution
To complement its current on-premises messaging solution, New Belgium decided to consider a cloud-based email service. It joined the Microsoft Rapid Deployment Program to evaluate Microsoft Office 365. Office 365 combines the familiar Office desktop with the next generation of cloud-based communication and collaboration services and includes Microsoft Exchange Online, which is based on Exchange Server 2010 technology. New Belgium wanted to understand how Exchange Online and Exchange Server 2010 would work together in its environment to help it reduce administration and increase availability for its employees. “We feel very comfortable moving our messaging solution to the cloud with Microsoft, because we feel like it is a very mature, stable service with all the latest capabilities,” says Morrison.
With Exchange Online, New Belgium can ensure that remote employees have access to their email as long as they have access to a computer or mobile device with an Internet connection, because Microsoft guarantees 99.9 percent uptime. “A third of our workforce is remote, so fault tolerance and high availability are things we have been expanding. As a smaller IT shop, we have looked for ways to facilitate that,” says Morrison.
With a hybrid solution, New Belgium can move mailboxes to Exchange Online at its own pace. It will begin by provisioning mailbox accounts for production workers in the cloud. New Belgium used Office 365 Directory Sync to maintain user and group configuration information between its on-premises environment and Office 365. The brewery also deployed Active Directory Federation Services to enable single sign-on, so that employees could maintain a single set of credentials. The IT staff can perform administrative tasks for both the online and on-premises environment through the Exchange Management Console. “Email is not where my time as an administrator is best spent,” explains Morrison. “With Office 365 and Exchange Server 2010, I can manage on-premises and off-premises mailboxes through a single console, which is very efficient.”
For employees without a dedicated computer, New Belgium will create kiosk subscriptions, so that employees can manage email through Outlook Web App on any computer with a broadband connection. Morrison explains, “Office 365 was intriguing to us because of the licensing model for kiosk workers versus [the licensing model] for office workers. [We] can provide kiosk workers who do not have a dedicated work area with the full functionality available in Exchange 2010.” They will have 500 megabytes (MB) of email storage available in the cloud, and they can also access many of the same capabilities as employees who use the Microsoft Outlook 2010 messaging and collaboration client.
“One of the things we have struggled with is mailbox size growth,” explains Morrison. With Exchange Online, remote employees with dedicated computers who use email more frequently will have larger mailboxes with 25 GB of storage in the cloud, and they can manage email and voice mail through Outlook Web App or the Outlook 2010 client. Whether their mailboxes are on-premises or in the cloud, employees share the same email domain name and can view the same global address list. They can also view each other’s calendar and free and busy data. In addition, they can move messages into a personal archive for long-term retention. They can easily search both their inboxes and their archives when they need to find something. “What we like about the larger mailboxes and the personal archive capability is that we can both reduce the amount of storage on our SAN and let employees manage their own email rather than applying more IT policies,” says Morrison. In addition, they can use Conversation View, which groups together messages from a single conversation, so they can quickly and easily identify the most recent messages, view the chain of responses, and see a preview of each response in a conversation when they open individual messages. With MailTips, employees are automatically alerted—before they click the Send button—whether a message recipient is out of the office, an attachment is too large to send, or a distribution list contains external recipients.
Because of the interoperation between Lync Server 2010 and Exchange Online, employees can continue to see rich presence information through Outlook Web App or Outlook 2010. They can also start chat sessions with available colleagues, and they can escalate to a voice call or online meeting with a single click of the mouse.
Benefits
By implementing a hybrid messaging solution with Exchange Online and Exchange Server 2010, New Belgium can better address the needs of its employees without sacrificing any of the unified communications capabilities they need to do their jobs. Production workers will have ready access to email through kiosk computers, and it can ensure that remote employees have stable, reliable service. It can also reduce costs and reduce administration.
Helps Reduce Costs
With Office 365, New Belgium can easily provision accounts for new employees in the cloud, so as the company grows, it can avoid additional software and storage costs as it adds people. In addition, after it has moved most of its mailboxes to Exchange Online, it can guarantee email availability without taking on the additional cost to maintain the solution on-premises. It can also retire its third-party spam filtering product. “It costs us a considerable amount to guarantee 99.9 percent uptime for our Exchange servers,” says Morrison. “With Exchange Online, we can reduce those costs, and we gain time to perform other tasks.”
New Belgium can also reduce hardware costs as it transitions more mailboxes to the cloud, because its on-premises solution will require fewer servers. Because most of the messaging data will be stored in the cloud, it can also reduce storage costs because the solution requires less storage overall. For messaging data stored on-premises, it can use less expensive SATA disks.
With Exchange Online, New Belgium can also ensure that employees have access to the latest technology without incurring the cost of upgrades that might require more hardware or storage. “We like to be on the leading edge,” says Morrison. “With Office 365, we will always have the latest version. We do not have to worry that cost will prohibit us from giving employees access to the latest capabilities.”
Reduces Administration
As New Belgium transitions to the cloud, it can gradually reduce administration tasks. “Because we can rely on Microsoft to manage maintenance for our mailboxes in the cloud, we can spend our time working on business projects instead of managing email servers,” says Morrison.
The IT staff especially appreciates the larger mailboxes and the personal archive in Exchange Online. “Because we will not have to worry about storage, we can allow people to manage their own email,” says Morrison. “For us, it alleviates the headache of enforcing quotas and applying policies.”
Enables Scalability
When New Belgium adds new employees, no matter where they are located, it can quickly provision new accounts. “Planning for growth is much simpler with a hosted service,” says Morrison. “We can add people without having to worry about whether we have enough licenses or storage to support them.”
Increases Availability
For its remote employees, New Belgium can ensure that service will be consistently available. With Exchange Online, it can expect disaster recovery through continuously-replicated, geo-redundant data centers that are third-party certified to international standards. The brewery can also take advantage of premium antispam and antivirus protection, 24 hour a day, seven days a week IT-level phone support, and a financially backed, 99.9 percent uptime service level agreement.
Friendly neighborhood pet store opens hundreds of new locations with the support of Dynamics AX
As written on customers.microsoft.com
Almost a year ago, Pet Supplies Plus had 300 stores across the United States and was planning aggressive store growth in the coming years. Decision makers at the company knew they would need a strong technological backbone to support such an ambitious expansion, so they chose Microsoft Dynamics AX to replace the company’s disparate ERP systems. Now that Pet Supplies Plus has begun deployment, the company is beginning to see the fruits of its labor—and the validation that it made the right choice.
Brown recommends LCS to help reduce deployment times as well as lower costs, and she says, “we now have a better understanding of how to implement Dynamics AX across our stores and how to scale up more quickly utilizing the different tools and services in LCS. If you start with LCS and work your way through the cloud deployment, it’s your one-stop shop and your entry point into developing your Azure environment.”
Empowering employees to provide better service
Since Pet Supplies Plus deployed Dynamics AX to its stores last year, the decision makers at the business have heard lots of feedback from employees who are very happy with the change. “I’ve asked on a number of occasions if they’d like to go back to the old system and, across-the-board, nobody wants to,” Tedder says. “They are very pleased with the features and functionality of the Dynamics POS application and the future ability to evolve the POS application even further.”
The company is still in the early stages of its deployment process and the few dozen stores that are up and running with the new system are only a small sample size of the overall implementation. But Tedder says that he’s already seeing improvements in the time it takes to train employees on Dynamics AX. He explains, “Reducing training time for new team members is going to be extremely important and will result in a material ROI for any retailer using Dynamics AX.”
Taking care of neighbors and their pets
Pet Supplies Plus is also using Dynamics AX to help standardize its data, streamline its workflow, and standardize business processes across all its locations. “Dynamics AX is fulfilling our wish to have one system of record, one version of the truth, and a simplified applications portfolio, especially for the corporate office environment,” says Tedder. “The combination of those things coupled with business intelligence and reporting will yield efficiencies and improve our ordering in the ongoing months—we planned for this; it was part of how we made the decision to go with Microsoft Dynamics AX.”
The most important benefits, however, will be for the neighbors who come in and shop at Pet Supplies Plus locations. Tedder says, “We want to make sure that we provide a convenient option for our customers to purchase supplies for their pets, at a great value. Our goal is to make sure that we capitalize on that magic moment between team members and neighbors when we’re helping them select and purchase the products they need for their pets.”
"I’ve asked on a number of occasions if they’d like to go back to the old system and, across-the-board, nobody wants to."
- Miles Tedder: Chief Operating Officer, Pet Supplies Plus
Introducing guest access for Office 365 Groups
By Christophe Fiessinger as written on blogs.office.com
Sometimes you need to work closely with customers, partners, suppliers or consultants outside of your organization, and you need collaboration tools to make this possible. Today, we are pleased to announce the new guest access feature for Office 365 Groups—the group membership service that provides a single identity for teams in Office 365. The new guest access feature gives you the ability to include people outside of your company in an Office 365 group.
We are rolling out guest access functionality in phases. Starting today, group owners can add guests to a group in Outlook on the web. Once added, guests receive a welcome email, are granted access to group files in SharePoint Online, begin receiving email messages and calendar invites sent to the group, and can send messages to the group. They also have automatic access to cloud-based file attachments. Guests have the option to leave the group at any time and visual indicators remind all members of guest participation in the group across all Outlook experiences.
Guest access works for any email accounts including corporate and consumer domains (such as Outlook.com or Gmail.com). If the guest email identity is associated with a Microsoft account (such as Office 365 or Outlook.com accounts, for instance), the user is directed to a sign-in page to identify themselves. If the guest doesn’t have a Microsoft account, they will be directed to a sign-up page to create an account.
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The Mediterranean Shipping Company has been under the same family leadership since its inception 43 years ago, and while the company now manages its fleet of 480 vessels from offices in 150 countries, it’s fair to say that its caring, corporate culture is as strong today as it ever was. But while we all feel connected to a large corporate family, unfortunately, our IT systems did not support that connectivity, or the global communications that we needed to compete in today’s digital economy.
