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Mace Group approached iTOPS to gain more insight into their IT environment. They were having noticeable issues with SPAM filtering with many false/positives, issues with remote access to email from both mobile and email based clients, challenges with the functionality of in-house email client, and issues with the ongoing management of systems.
Initially to determine existing IT systems setup and provide systems documentation and recommendations to address existing issues. Plan for, and implement a new email and calendaring system, for 140 users across New Zealand and Australian offices, and seamlessly migrate all existing data and users to the new systems, while ensuring as little disruption to business as possible.
We presented Mace Group example documents of our auditing process, and our audit template, to give a comprehensive view of what we would cover and the outcomes from that process. We then audited the New Zealand network, using scanning tools to gather information on existing systems and weaknesses, and using templates for gathering data on specific items in our audit process. We presented Mace Group with network diagrams, a listing of all computer systems within their New Zealand operations, a completed audit document, and analysed the data to present recommendations for their IT systems.
While the business was well aware of existing pain points around their email system, our audit also identified main areas of shortcomings related to server sprawl (too many servers), and in backup and disaster recovery ability.
The email system, in terms of hardware and software, required updating and we recommended implementing a more widely supported cloud based solution. We presented a project plan and timing to carry out an email migration, from IBM Notes on client computers, connected to IBM Domino running on AS400 server, to Microsoft Office 365. The existing platforms presented additional complications over a more standard Office365 migration, in that we had to address migration of data from extremely disparate systems. The recommended solution, allowed the business to adopt the use of Microsoft Outlook, a more commonly used business email client, and enabled seamless access to data whether through email client, web portal, or via a mobile device. Migration to a cloud based platform, allowed the retirement and cessation of support for two aging in-house servers. The ongoing management issues related to SPAM filtering solution were addressed via outsourcing to Microsoft and trusting to the global scale of their filtering management in Office 365. When the New Zealand migration was completed we worked with local Australian IT support to migrate all Australian users.
“Mace Group chose iTOPS to do a full IT audit for our companies in Australia and New Zealand. They came highly recommended by two other companies that we worked closely with who used iTOPS for their complete IT needs. iTOPS provided us with comprehensive report on this issue and outlined limitations in our system. We have since fully contracted out our IT requirements to iTOPS in New Zealand and they work closely with our IT person in Australia. We have moved to a new email system in both countries which has created efficiencies over our old email system and eliminated the considerable difficulties we had getting the previous system to communicate with smart phones. We would highly recommend iTOPS to other companies based on our experience.”
