Aligning Badger Communications with Office 365 – what was the result?

29 Nov 2016

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As one of Auckland’s leading advertising agencies, Badger Communications knows the value of good correspondence. The business works with a number of enterprises in the Asia Pacific region across several platforms including brand strategy, design, content and digital – helping organisations reach their peak.

Of course, for the Badger Communications team to be able to assist clients in reaching their tailored goals, their own systems and processes need to be up to standard. Unfortunately, as Managing Director Matthew Masters explained, the business has fought through various technological challenges relating to communication. Across both emails and calendars, Badger Communications had become a victim of its success – growing quickly and not having the appropriate technology systems to match.

Systems stuck in the past

Badger Communications struggled to maintain contact with clients.

To use Matthew’s own words, the business had a “hotchpotch” of many systems that they had assembled over the years. As well as having their own internal server to manage document sharing, there was a separate POP service provided by the old TelstraClear Service, while calendars and meetings were run from the Mac OS X server (iCal).

  • Calendar issues

This mess of processes often didn’t work cohesively with both internal and external parties with calendars and emails letting Badger Communications down time after time.

“We were having extensive problems with integrating with the calendars of our clients and also communicating with them. People would be setting up meetings and they wouldn’t appear in calendars,” Matthew said.

This happened a number of times and caused disharmony with a major client after meetings were not shared properly. While this was partly because the client’s system didn’t handle iCal, it would prove to be a moment that made Matthew wonder if there were better options available.

  • Email problems

At the same time, there were a couple of issues related to Badger Communications’ email system. One included the integration across devices.

“As we were running on POP servers, if you wanted to receive emails on smartphones or tablets as well as your desktop, there were certain issues with the ways that was set up,” Matthew continued.

Secondly, because of the way that TelstraClear was set up, there were overarching security measures on the servers. Unless you had a TelstraClear ISP, you couldn’t access the company servers to send emails from home.

Matthew remembers one incident where an employee lost all their emails because they were stored on their internal system once downloaded from the server. This corrupted their entire mail database and they lost a lot of historic emails.

“While this wasn’t the end of the world, it was problematic for our team,” Matthew noted.

As a result of these challenges, Matthew and his team considered their options. One included overhauling their entire system and hosting it themselves – a solution that would be very costly. Thanks to a tip from a team member, Matthew decided to work with Imagetext, a decision that has help immensely since the relationship formed in early 2016.

Welcoming Office365 

Technology audits can find the problems at hand.

The first task for Imagetext was to analyse the current systems and evaluate what needed to improve. Imagetext suggested that Badger Communications adopt Office 365 – an option that Matthew was more than happy to do.

With the migration, Imagetext set everything up offline including personal emails, as much in line with the current system as possible. The business also got its domain transferred, with Imagetext taking care of all the communications with the provider.

“At the moment, we are just using the hosted email and calendar server. In addition to this, we have a couple of Office 365 subscriptions,” Matthew said.

“In the fullness of time, we will migrate all that mish-mash of individual licensed products to Office 365.”

Matthew explained the migration has worked well and credits Imagetext with great support and insight into what needed to change. As his business grows, he hopes to adopt more services and continue advancing internal systems at Badger Communications.

For more information about how Imagetext can help your enterprise, contact our expert team today.

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