Communication and collaboration tool provider Polycom has adopted the Microsoft Enterprise Cloud Suite and the latest range of Microsoft Office 365 services.

Based in San Jose, California, Polycom has more than 950 technology patents that aim to unleash the power of human collaboration. The company has endeavoured to enable teamwork between distributed workforces and help bring colleagues and customers together.

The company also works to maximise the solutions available to improve its internal collaboration to help achieve aggressive growth goals.

“We knew that we wanted to move away from managing servers, networks, and storage and be able to provide greater value for our user base,” said Luc Trudel, vice president of IT Infrastructure and Operations at Polycom. “By using cloud-based solutions such as Microsoft Office 365, we bring new features to our workforce more quickly because they’re constantly updated.”

Having worked in a Microsoft-based infrastructure for a long time, Polycom knew that its employees were familiar and happy with the technology. This naturally led to the decision to adopt of Office 365.

“There’s so much included that makes our employees’ lives easier and supports our culture of collaboration,” said Trudel. “And with security threats becoming more pervasive and sophisticated, being able to rely on Microsoft Advanced Threat Protection as a kind of virtual shield in front of our data and services is of huge value.”

Polycom received support from Microsoft Premier Proactive Services during the transition to the cloud. The company also used Microsoft FastTrack to accelerate its migration and BrainStorm videos for training.

Polycom is now starting to feel the benefits of Office 365. For example, migrating from Microsoft Exchange Server to Exchange Online – and gaining Advanced Threat Protection and Advanced eDiscovery for enhanced security and legal analytics – has already produced positive results.

“We appreciate how many advanced features are built right into Office 365,” said Trudel. “We used to have to integrate and manage our own email archiving system, along with a separate legal discovery system. Now, with Exchange Online Archiving and eDiscovery, our IT staff is freed from maintaining separate systems, and groups around the company have easy access to those tools. We’ve also enabled employees who are close to specific issues to conduct eDiscovery themselves. Everybody wins.”

Polycom has also adopted Yammer to deliver company announcements, knowledge sharing and social networking, and Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus with Click-to-Run for an accessible, unified desktop experience.

A number of employees have also started to use Microsoft Delve and Microsoft Sway to stay up to date on the trends and information that are important to the work they are doing and to produce visually appealing designs using an interactive canvas.

“By adopting Office 365, we’ll easily save more than US$1 million over a three-year period just in hardware and support costs alone, rather than using on-premises email and collaboration solutions,” said Trudel. “That doesn’t even include the system administration and other resources we’d have needed, not to mention the benefits we’ve gained from all the other Office 365 services.”

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