Customer: MRM // McCann
Country: Greece
Industry: Advertising
Organization Size: Large
Products & Services:
Customer Profile
MRM // McCann is a leading global marketing firm providing today’s marketers with best-in-class strategic and creative services that meet their brand-building needs across all communications channels. Their employees collaborate to integrate advertising, relationship management, promotion/event marketing, worldwide production, and all forms of digital marketing.
Situation
MRM // McCann was faced with outdated information and communication technology (IT), ageing hardware assets and increasing administration costs. Hence the management recognized the need to transform the way IT was delivered.
It was clear that some technology transformation was required to power the company over the next three years and beyond. They sought to leverage Cloud options where possible, resulting in a Hybrid Cloud service where they could decommission existing hardware assets and leverage best of breed virtual IT services to improve agility, efficiency and reliability. An old Exchange Server 2010 had to be upgraded along with the need to manage all of IT assets (software, hardware).
The company needed:
- a high availability solution to ensure maximum up time
- seeing the opportunity for growth and expansion with Office 365
- high availability on board
Situation
As a trusted advisor to MRM // McCann and a gold certified partner of Microsoft, Office Line SA proposed and implemented a highly available environment based on Microsoft’s Hyper-V technology. The technology is stable, mature, enterprise ready and cheaper than its rivals.
The team installed and configured the Hyper-V servers on 2 physical HP servers with ISCI connections (10GB) to an HP MSA storage along with 2 HP 10GB switches in IRF topology.
All of the active directory users along with their computers were migrated from the old system to the new one and a synchronized copy of AD users was hosted on Microsoft’s Cloud services. Symantec’s Backup Exec software was used for create full and incremental onsite and offsite backups.
At this point and after considering the minimal disruption to the company’s user operation along with the reliability and collaboration tools that Office 365 has to offer, the client accepted Office Line’s migration path. Our engineers migrated Exchange mailboxes to Office 365 and have additionally configured services like SharePoint Online and Skype for Business for extended collaboration between company resources and staff.
Office 365 implementation benefited the customer in:
- Integrating with Microsoft Office (offline)
- Setting up an intranet website
- Developing Group Sites, shared calendars
- Uploading and sharing documents including documents created using MS Office
- Videoconferencing using Skype for Business
- Mail management using Outlook and Microsoft Exchange online
- Ability to customize using code written on Microsoft.NET
The last element of this project was the installation of Microsoft’s Systems Center Configuration Manager 2012 R2. The need to manage easily the software deployment and systems updates along with monitoring hardware parts of the network made SCCM and invaluable tool to the IT staff at MRM // McCann.
Benefits
By using Hyper-V hosts and virtual machine density, capacity, and scalability, the client’s IT staff can concentrate on service improvements rather than on operational tasks, such as deploying new hardware to keep up with the demands of a growing business. It can also scale its environment faster to accommodate customer demand. By using Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2, the customer will be able to support a 25 percent growth in business without growing data center staff.
Office 365’s anytime, anywhere access along with the communication, collaboration and security inside and outside the organization offered MRM // McCann great productivity across the organization.
By delivering the project from the Office Line, MRM // McCann reaps the following benefits:
- High availability of critical services
- Increased Flexibility and Productivity
- Reduce IT costs