Executive Summary
Simplatech delivers a range of IT consulting services to small and mid-sized business. Their large-scale landscaping client—Stillwater Landscape Management—had a large-scale problem: how to provide updated contact information to employees who are never in the office and use their smartphones as their primary business tool. After much research, Simplatech chose CiraSync to automatically sync internal contacts within Office 365 for the client’s remote workforce.
Challenges
Stillwater Landscape Management has been in business for nine years and has had hundreds of employees over time in their address book. Most employees work outside of the office providing landscaping and maintenance services to commercial and Homeowners Association (HOA) managed residential properties.
In the past, the company ran an in-house exchange server that connected to only one mailbox. They had outgrown many aspects of their outdated server and made the switch to Microsoft Office 365. Once the company switched, they ran into trouble with syncing employee contacts. Office 365 does not automatically sync contacts and calendars to mobile phones. This limitation of Office 365 made for a big headache for Simplatech.
“Anytime an employee left, was onboarded or a contact changed we had to manually make the updates, so the field personnel had the correct contact information,” said Paul Spencer, Senior Engineer, Simplatech. “When employees would leave or if they had turnover, it became a cumbersome and annoying manual process to deal with. These employees are never in the office, don’t have a computer and are 100% reliant on having correct information in their phones while on the road,” he continued.
“CiraSync does exactly what it’s supposed to do the first time. It’s very easy to get up and running right away. I’ve never found a more useful tool.”
Paul Spencer, Senior Engineer, Simplatech
Solution
Spencer needed to find a better way and had a hunch there must be a solution out there which could solve his challenge of manually syncing contacts. He performed a Google search and found CiraSync. He first experimented with CiraSync by only putting one phone number in the system and quickly realized this was the solution he had needed for years. “I’ve never found a more useful tool to use for a specific situation,” said Spencer. “I am usually disappointed to find something that may have a good interface but terrible execution. Not the case with CiraSync, it was a huge help and changed the entire process that was previously a grueling grind.”
Simplatech set up the Office 365 account, used CiraSync to sync to the Office 365 Global Address List (GAL) to the address book and as Spencer said, “Boom everyone was automatically updated.” He was thrilled to not have to copy and paste each contact and have a solution that actually works. “A lot of things are nice to have but not essential. This is essential,” continued Spencer.
When Simplatech was getting started, they contacted the CiraSync support desk. They remarked at how friendly and helpful the support staff was, as well as how easy it was to get started. They are looking forward to rolling CiraSync out to all of their clients. These solutions can be incredibly powerful for teams now working from home as well.
