CORUS Consulting automated corporate mail in a unified cloud environment based on Microsoft Office 365 for SPAR Retail company

Prior to the beginning of the project two mail systems — Microsoft Exchange 2010 on the platform of external hosting provider and own mail service based on the open source were used. The functionality of systems was users, narrow and insufficient for comfortable work, and administration of systems required big time expenditure. Before the management "SPAR Retail" rose need of transition to uniform mail space.

Choosing a Solution

The company the solution allowing to minimize costs for deployment and support of corporate e-mail and also existence of the resources available to users even in case of failure or failure of local infrastructure, and means of internal communications was required. The Microsoft Office 365 platform was as a result selected. The choice was caused by a broad spectrum of corporate solutions as a part of the platform, such as mail service (Exchange Online), services for internal communications (Lync, Yammer) and joint work (SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business). The task of implementation of the new Microsoft Office 365 platform was undertaken by specialists of CORUS Consulting group, the best partner of Microsoft corporation in Russia in the Cloud B2B direction: Azure in 2014.

Result

Due to transition to Office 365 annual expenses on support more than one thousand mail accounts of the company were reduced by 30%. Employees "SPAR Retail" received mail accounts with a capacity up to 50 GB and an effective remedy of internal communication of Microsoft Lync. In addition to transfer of a mail system migration of the user work calendars and an address space was also implemented. In addition, in "SPAR Retail" was unrolled corporate social network based on Microsoft Yammer and service for joint work of OneDrive for Business with a capacity of 1 of Tb for each user.

Also the possibility of installation necessary the politician of access to use of applications for each user according to their requirements was implemented. Cloud accounts of users were integrated with the local Active Directory system that gave the chance to users to use a uniform account and one password in cloud and local infrastructure. The additional functionality of the solution Office 365, in particular, planning of business meetings of employees and electronic armoring of meeting rooms became available to the staff of the company that was performed by means of writing of paper requests earlier.

"I am sure that not only migration of the SPAR Retail mail in a cloud, but also emergence of additional solutions which will help the retailer to reduce costs for the different directions considerably became an important project deliverable: it both the system of internal communications, and services for the organization of joint work and interaction", - Alexander Nevinchany, the Head of Department of the basic solutions Microsoft CORUS Consulting Group notes.

The Chief information officer "SPAR Retail" Mikhail Krasavin shared experience of creation of a failsafe mail service based on Office 365. "SPAR Retail" - the world's largest retail network numbering 13,700 supermarkets in 35 countries worldwide. According to Mikhail Krasavin before Office 365 implementation, monthly, from a total quantity of the arriving requests in technical support service from 5 to 7 percent it was the share of incidents work-related mails. These interruptions were caused by use of two mail systems (the mail service developed on Open Source to the platform + by Hosted Microsoft Exchange), lack of a uniform address space, the diverse environment of the mail systems. After implementation of a cloud solution the number of addresses came down to zero.

In addition employees "SPAR Retail" received simple tools for fast daily work: Microsoft Lync, OneDrive for Business, Microsoft SharePoint.