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Big Red Book Selects Office 365, Improving Customer Service and Product Development Time

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In today’s post we hear from Big Red Book on why Microsoft was the best decision for their business to embrace cloud computing!

"We do not need the hassle of managing our own email and other services. We previously evaluated Google Apps as a potential solution for our corporate email and document needs. Google Docs is not really suitable for business use due to limited functionality and the lack of offline capabilities.”

--Paraic Nolan, IT Manager and Finance Director, Big Red Book

Big Red Book
Founded in 1993, Big Red Book provides accounting and payroll software to 30,000 small and midsize businesses in Ireland. Its software has an easy-to-use interface compared to more complex enterprise resource planning systems. The company is currently working on a project to develop cloud-based services for payroll and accounting called Big Red Cloud, and it expects that service to help it grow, both within Ireland and internationally.

IT Challenges
Based in Dublin, Ireland, the company's 18 employees develop applications, test software, and support customers. Because of its size, the company's employees take on multiple roles. Paraic Nolan, Finance Director at Big Red Book, says, "My official title is Finance Director, but I am also the IT department and I manage the development process."

Big Red Book has a support team that responds to customer emails and answers customer questions over the phone. For email, Big Red Book had a single server with Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 managed on-premises, and most employees used Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 to access email. With limited IT resources and no failover server, Big Red Book had frequent periods of downtime.

Big Red Book also wanted its support team, developers, and testers to work more closely together. It was using an internal customer relationship management system to track development tasks, but this information was not linked to the development application environment. Employees found it difficult to locate information, such as development team meeting notes, which employees took by hand, typed into Microsoft Office Word 2007, and sent to team members by email.

IT Solution and Benefits
Big Red Book moved to Microsoft Office 365 to help improve email reliability and collaboration among its support team, developers, and testers. Office 365 brings together cloud versions of Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft Lync Online, and Microsoft SharePoint Online with the latest version of the Microsoft Office Professional Plus desktop suite.

Nolan says, "We do not need the hassle of managing our own email and other services. We previously evaluated Google Apps as a potential solution for our corporate email and document needs. Google Docs is not really suitable for business use due to limited functionality and the lack of offline capabilities." The company moved all employees to Office 365 in April 2011 with the help of Itomic IT Services, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. Nolan says, "Itomic helped make the transition easy. It helped with planning, setting up domains, and migration and its services were excellent."

"By using Office 365, employees get the rich desktop experience of Office Professional Plus and the browser experience of Microsoft Office Web Apps." Nolan adds, "The Office Web Apps are fantastic. They do not have all of the capabilities of the rich client, but they have most of the frequently used features, so they are perfect for working from home."

Big Red Book has adopted the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate development system and Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 to help develop and test its software, including its new Big Red Cloud project. The development solution interoperates with Microsoft Excel 2010 spreadsheet software to provide a great workflow solution between developers and testers to resolve issues. The development team expects to use Microsoft OneNote 2010 note-taking program with SharePoint Online to capture and share team meeting notes, and by using Lync Online, Big Red Book now has an instant messaging solution with rich presence information.

Big Red Book estimates that with Office 365 it has reduced IT costs in its first year by €4,470 (U.S.$6,400) or €250 ($360) per employee. "The ability to communicate better is difficult to quantify, but there is definitely a financial benefit. The more efficiently we communicate, the better products we can deliver," says Nolan. "Office 365 is a key part of our business strategy."

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