"The seventh continent" completed one of the world's largest implementations of Office 365

The implementation project of Office 365 in Seventh Continent company became the first implementation in Russian retail segment and the world's largest implementation of Office 365 in the commercial sector with simultaneous use of opportunities of telephony of Lync Server 2010. Reported about it the Russian division of Microsoft on October 4, 2012.

Background

The equipment for storage of mailboxes of Seventh Continent company limited possibilities of expansion of number of users of service and volume of the stored data that had negative effect on quality and speed of work of employees. For the solution of this task the company management made the decision on migration on Microsoft Office 365.

Solution

The project of migration on Exchange Online took about 3 months. The pilot project started in November, 2011 and ended in January, 2012. Actually a transfer of 2500 users to a cloud mail resource was made from January to May, 2012.

Process of transition to Office 365 happened in Seventh Continent in several stages: at first the staff of the Moscow office, after them – personnel of regional offices, then the staff of shops was translated.

"Migration took place in Office 365 for us quickly enough and smoothly. At the moment about 2400 mailboxes of users are already transferred to a cloud, and their owners can fully use Office 365 infrastructure, including a desktop packet of Microsoft Office. In the nearest future we are going to transfer to a cloud of the remained 150 users", – Alexander Pershutov, the Chief information officer of Seventh Continent company told.

Result

Transfer of mail with Exchange Server allowed not only to increase the volume of mailboxes by Exchange Online more than by 12 times, but also to save about $200 thousand on failure from purchase of new storage systems.

"Transfer of a mail service with Exchange Server Exchange Online allowed not only to increase the volume of mailboxes of employees to 25 GB by its cloud analog, but also to provide an opportunity to save resources, without purchasing the equipment with "stock" for 5 years ahead. As an alternative migrations on Office 365 we had an exit – to purchase new storage system and servers that would mean serious investments", - Alexander Pershutov noted.

Advantages

Thanks to transition to Office 365 the Seventh Continent company had an opportunity to reduce housekeeping overheads of the IT infrastructure.

Besides, in the company Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 unrolled in data center of Seventh Continent and SharePoint Online entering into Office 365 is actively used.

"We made the correct strategic investments. With Office 365 we provided the company with IT infrastructure which and in 5 years will allow us to provide users with the best IT solutions without additional capital costs", – Alexander Pershutov considers.

Integrators

CROC was the main integrator on the project, reported TAdviser in Microsoft. V6 integrator was attracted to implementation of SharePoint.