Executive Summary
Higher Resolutions, the premiere provider of managed services and comprehensive IT solutions in the Austin Texas area, delivers innovative and practical services to their utility clients. One of their clients—San Bernard Electric Cooperative, Inc. (SBEC)—is a distribution utility and serves 25,000 meters in eight Texas counties. After moving to Microsoft Office 365, SBEC found that Office 365 does not automatically sync contacts, shared calendars, and notes to business smartphones—a critical business requirement for an organization with three office locations and a mobile workforce. Higher Resolutions IT experts were tasked with finding a secure, Azure-based SaaS solution that automatically synced Office 365 contact lists to employee smartphones for SBEC.
Challenges
Traditionally, small- to mid-size electric cooperatives have not been early adopters of technology causing Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) like Higher Resolutions to often run into resistance when proposing new technology solutions that address business needs of the day. But, SBEC, founded in 1939, adopted cloud-first technology by moving the entire organization to Azure-based Office 365 in the spring of 2018. Soon they realized that Microsoft doesn’t support the automated syncing of Office 365 shared Global Address Lists (GALs) to business smartphones and tasked their IT solutions provider, Higher Resolution, to find a better way. Chris Murphy, Owner of Higher Resolutions, contacted Microsoft and found out that their solution to syncing wasn’t a solution at all.
“Technically speaking, CiraSync is an easy solution to use and to start using right away.”
Chris Murphy, Higher Resolutions
Solution
Mr. Murphy went online to look through user forums and found CiraSync while searching for viable solutions. He decided to try out the demo and quickly learned how fast and easy it was to get started. “Once we tried CiraSync internally in our own environment, we decided this is a no brainer to roll out for our client,” said Mr. Murphy.
New and current SBEC employees are pleased with the ability to have instant access to the company directory and GAL on their smartphones. Higher Resolutions has been using CiraSync for a year without coming across any challenges, having even contacted support about a question regarding the Partner Portal and found the staff friendly and knowledgeable.
Higher Resolutions is looking forward to rolling out CiraSync to their other utility clients across Texas.
