Cloud transformation for Wilfred Smith

Wilfrid Smith Limited supply raw materials and chemicals throughout the UK, Europe and beyond. The group was founded by Wilfrid Smith in 1927 and started trading in central London.

Operating in a legacy Lotus Notes IBM environment presented several challenges for Wilfrid Smith including;

• Infrastructure maintenance and management costs were increasing.
• Due to the age of the Notes servers, updates were slow, increasing downtime and thus impacting on productivity.
• Remote email access was difficult for users.
• Extended server downtime was creating Spam filtering issues.
• Notes software updates required a time-consuming manual process.

Wilfrid Smith needed an email solution that was more reliable, flexible and adaptable.

As Wilfrid Smith’s managed IT services provider BCN offered the senior management a discovery session to look at potential improvements. This discovery day enabled BCN to recommend the migration to Office 356 and advise of the benefits, capabilities and cost savings it could bring to their organisation.

After the success of the discovery day BCN worked with Wilfrid Smith, defining a clear strategy to implement and deploy Microsoft Office 365. 70 GB of critical data including emails, folders, contacts and calendars was successfully migrated over to Office 365 from Lotus Notes using Cloud Migrator.

The BCN team subsequently delivered a one-day training session on how to use the key functionality of Office 365, OneDrive and Skype for Business.

Wilfrid Smith now have an infrastructure that gives their staff:

• Easier remote email access any-time, anywhere, from any device.
• Office 365 continues working in the background during server downtime improving productivity.
• Software updates are installed silently with minimal disruption to the user.
• Improved SPAM filter in Office 365 has reduced the loss of emails.
• Field base users can use OneDrive and Skype for Business on the go via their mobile devices.
• The license entitles users to the latest Office package and future updates.
• Increased collaboration and communication using Skype for Business.
• Ability to store large volumes of data in the Cloud via One Drive removing the need to use a dongle for portable backups.