Theta has outsourced its email to the cloud - moving from using an on-site Microsoft Exchange email server to Microsoft’s new Online Services offering.
We made the switch as our on-site Microsoft Exchange email server, with associated back-ups, software upgrades, disaster recovery equipment and outage costs, was proving costly to maintain. And valuable staff were spending hours keeping the system running rather than working with customers.
The result is reduced costs, improved performance, higher availability and greater resilience.
Using Microsoft Online Services offering means we continue using the familiar Outlook client, with its full suite of features.
We are believers in the game-changing capabilities of the cloud and this move to online services was the perfect opportunity for us to prove it actually worked.
Theta staff did the migration which took just over a week to migrate all 75 mailboxes and 15 resources (including meeting rooms and car parks). The migration was completed with minimal disruption to the business and has had some extra unexpected benefits.
Remote access to mail is faster - as it doesn’t use our server or network anymore. Spam filtering is improved – because we now benefit from the improved spam protection that Online Services provides. And we are able to redeploy the old Exchange server – creating new capacity for the development work we do for clients.
The knowledge we have gained from this migration added to the work we have done to research and prototype new cloud services – such as Microsoft’s cloud development platform Azure – places us in a strong position to determine how our customers can benefit from these technologies.
About Microsoft Online Services
Microsoft Online Services is a suite of cloud – or Software as a Service – offerings. The suite includes various products and bundles:
- Exchange Online – Email, shared calendars and contacts
- Office Live Meeting – Web Conferencing
- SharePoint Online – Centralised resource and workflow management
- Office Communications Online – Instant messaging and Presence awareness
- Business Productivity Online Standard Suite – which includes all of the above
