Office 365: License management, version control and streamlined infrastructure

The IT infrastructure of small and medium-sized companies often develops organically as the business grows. But, what seems a neat solution when a company has a few employees can often become problematic as a company’s growth continues. In this short video, Toby Chapman-Dawe, managing director of Strand Writing and Design explains how growth created three specific issues for his company which he overcame with the assistance of Compete366 by migrating to Office 365.

About Strand Writing and Design

Strand Writing and Design is a highly specialised copywriting agency that works exclusively with information technology companies keen to create concise, crisp, clear marketing materials. Strand’s core expertise focuses on content creation, typically case studies and success stories, white papers and thought leadership and marketing collateral such as product and service brochures.

Strand’s challenges

Strand wanted to make the business more agile by being able to open new offices or relocate offices and add new users to their systems more simply. Toby Chapman-Dawe identified three specific challenges that he wanted to overcome:

Version control

Users throughout the company were working on different versions of MS Word and this was causing compatibility issues. Toby wanted to find a way of ensuring all staff members were working on the same version at the same time.

License management

As a supplier to the software industry being up to date with licensing is important to Strand. Toby Chapman-Dawe wanted a way of simplifying the licensing process to reduce admin and ensure all team members were licensed properly.

Rationalise infrastructure

As the company had grown it had adopted different cloud vendors to achieve a cloud infrastructure, but now it had reached a size where it was unwieldy, not joined up and hard to use. Toby Chapman-Dawe sought a solution that integrated the functionality and gave growth possibilities for the future such as HD video conferencing.

The Consultation

At the first meeting between Compete366 and Strand, the agenda was focused purely on the business’s needs and challenges. Compete366’s consultant built a picture of how Strand wanted to work, what IT challenges it faced and how the company’s IT infrastructure needed to operate to support the MD’s vision. Once complete, Compete366 was quickly able to see that Strand was an ideal candidate for a migration to Office 365 which would solve all three critical issues and offer plenty of scope for further development in the future.

The Implementation

Compete366 created and presented a complete migration roadmap including detailed timings, which was presented to and agreed by the Strand team. Importantly, the plan promised no downtime, no risk of data loss and no hefty upfront licensing bills. The project started on time, ran to time and was completed on time.

The Results

Two team members feature in this video and explain the results succinctly. Team members went home one day working on the old system and came in the next day on the new system. It worked perfectly from day one and employees even noticed performance improvements. Toby Chapman-Dawe is delighted with the migration and is now planning to move his file servers into the cloud too. All Strand team members now enjoy integrated email and internal instant messaging which is helping teamwork and efficiency.


If you’d like to find out how we can help you migrate your email to Office 365, simply get in touch. We’ll be pleased to help.

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Tim Entwistle, Head of Software Development, Herrco

“Working with Compete366 has been like extending our own team – they are extremely and easy to work with. Right from the outset, it was clear what was on offer – everything was presented to us in a straightforward and uncomplicated way. They also provided just the right level of challenge to our developers and saved us time and money by suggesting better ways to implement our infrastructure.”

Oliver Mackereth, Project Director, Hanse

“Compete366 were able to help us leverage some useful contacts in Microsoft. We really value the expert advice and guidance that they have offered us in setting up a highly scalable infrastructure. We are also setting in place a regular monthly meeting which will allow us to further refine our architecture and ensure we keep on track as our requirements grow and change.”

Matt Brocklehurst, Technical Director - AWOL Adventure

“I have been delighted with the migration, where my team worked very hard, supported by expert advice from Compete366, and achieved everything in the timescale we had set out. Compete 366 made sure that we didn’t make any expensive mistakes, and guided us through the process”

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