Developing Business Agility through Office 365

More and more companies are moving towards online exchange because of the advantages that this option offers. The benefits include freeing up of internal resources, reducing corporate liability, lowering overhead costs and better uptime. According to Microsoft, the uptime for Office 365 is 99.9%, which equals to about 5 minutes of downtime in a year. This means that users on online exchange can be more productive as they will not experience as many technical problems as they would when working on premises exchange, which essentially means the same for maintenance costs.

MA Automotive is the Group Company specialized in producing and assembling steel automotive structural parts, components, subassemblies, and modules. It is presently in Italy, Europe, South America, Africa and Asia and currently manages 26 production plants and 3 Research and Development Centres.

When MA automotive decided to start reducing costs on their then current Microsoft exchange environment by leveraging Microsoft Office 365, they approached AVeS and requested the setup of a proof of concept for Office 365 (trial version) integrated with their Microsoft Exchange on their premises.

The Microsoft Office 365 Proof of Concept setup assisted in familiarizing the client with the capabilities of Office 365. It assisted in the assessment of the client’s readiness for migration to Office 365 services. The users get a live experience of Office 365 in a lab environment.

We implemented a Hybrid Microsoft Exchange 2010 Sp3 environment to Office 365, by using Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services for a single sign on, and Azure Active Directory Connect to synchronize on premises username and password to Office 365 Azure Active Directory. This allowed us to give the user a single sign on experience to Office 365 applications when the user is migrated to Office 365 and exchange online.

“The AVeS team was great throughout the project and we have learned about new technology and new ways of doing things, this opens up new opportunities for us.” -Cobus de Jager- IT Manager – MA Automotive.