Executive Summary
Illinois-based Sterling Bay is a successful commercial real estate development company which transforms spaces, businesses, and communities by identifying and creating unique urban campuses. They have created headquarter space for top U.S. companies including Google, McDonald’s, Uber, and Hillshire Brands. With developers, investors, builders, and innovators located all across the state of Illinois, they needed to find an automated software contact and calendar syncing solution to enable all employees—in and out of the office—to access the latest Office 365 Global Address List (GAL) contacts on business smartphones.
Challenges
Sterling Bay has a small IT support team and every day they were faced with a manual and time-consuming challenge: they updated the company’s Active Directory at 11 PM each night, and then pushed it out to hundreds of employees. The IT team felt there had to be a better way—a secure, Azure-based SaaS solution that could automate this laborious and error-prone task. They were also looking for additional functionality, such as associating contacts with specific properties so that employees could quickly and easily find the right contact for a particular property.
“We love using CiraSync, it’s so helpful and it allows our employees to have on-demand access to our contacts.”
Lauren Whittaker, IT User Support, Sterling Bay
Solution
With employees in so many locations working varied hours, plus the large number of vendors and customers associated with specific properties, Sterling Bay needed an automated software solution which would frequently sync Office 365 contacts and addresses of employees, vendors, and customers to business smartphones. Finding and deploying the CiraSync SaaS solution provided the Sterling Bay IT team with several wins: automated GAL sync to business smartphones multiple times a day, sorting contacts by property or address, and syncing employee photos to smartphones, making it easier to find the right person.
“We love using CiraSync; it’s so helpful, and it allows our employees to have on-demand access to our contacts,” said Lauren Whittaker, IT User Support. “We’ve also allowed for the addition of employee photos which are also synced to help find people even easier.”
