Executive Summary
MERGE is a marketing and communications company in Boston’s Innovation District that combines vertical intelligence, technology, and creativity to help clients solve complex business challenges. With almost 300 employees working in a variety of work environments in three different cities (Boston, Atlanta, and Chicago), they needed to find a secure software solution for centralized contact syncing to employee smartphones.
Challenges
MERGE had a special challenge: they became a single agency out of mergers with six separate agencies. Each of the merging agencies came with their own separate mail servers, in-house technologies, cloud solutions, and misplaced or mismanaged contact directories. The IT and help desk employees were spending an inordinate amount of time working one-on-one with employees to find the contact information they needed. All-in-all, significant IT resource time was spent trying to manage a messy situation created by a mash up of various technologies.
“With all of our mergers, our directories and contacts were a mess. CiraSync helped get the company on the same page.”
Rick Heil, IT Director, MERGE
Solution
The IT team decided it was time to migrate all employees to Azure-based Microsoft Office 365. This would unite multiple cross-functional teams and ensure all employees were using the same solution. The one major challenge they found with Office 365 was a lack of functionality which would allow updated and accurate Exchange directories and contacts to sync with employee smartphones automatically at all times.
“I spent just a few minutes on reddit.com and found a strong recommendation for CiraSync. It was the answer to our problems with automated contact management,” said Rick Heil IT Director, MERGE. “We set it and forget it with CiraSync.”
The company found the Azure-based CiraSync SaaS solution to be the simplest and most cost-effective way to sync contacts for the entire company. Since the implementation of CiraSync, the MERGE IT help desk has seen a dramatic decrease in help calls requesting help in getting accurate and up-to-date contacts on business smartphones. With the deployment of CiraSync, the help desk staff now have more time to work on more challenging IT projects instead of helping people get something as basic as getting an accurate contact on a smartphone.
