Case Study

The Challenges

BESC had recently been purchased by a new management team who were looking to expand its operations. To do this, they needed an IT service provider with a solution which would support MYOB Exo, an ERP system. At the same time, they were looking to improve their email as it was a collection of Bigpond email addresses. This did not look professional to their clients and in addition did not offer a very good mobile experience.

As the business had just been purchased there was a requirement to minimise capital expenditure.

Business Objectives

• IT platform to support MYOB Exo
• Email platform that allowed for a good mobile experience and looked professional for clients
• Minimise costs

The Solution

MYOB Exo requires a dedicated server with SQL to run reliably. To achieve this for BESC in a cost effective way, a new virtual server was created on an existing Hyper-V host. This allowed us to re-use the existing hardware and an existing Windows Server 2012 license. SQL Express was used which is a free product. The benefits of this approach was minimal upfront costs with only the backup software (ShadowProtect) needing to be purchased.

Slow internet connectivity in the industrial area of the Bunbury region prohibited a full cloud solution for MYOB Exo.

The existing email platform was a collection of Bigpond email addresses. This presented problems when trying to use the email on mobile devices as the email didn’t synchronize across platforms. For example, an email deleted on the phone would still be on the computer and vice versa.

Our solution was to use BESC’s existing domain name (BESC.com.au) and use the Office 365 Cloud platform. By using the BESC domain name, we are able to setup users with name@besc.com.au, meeting BESC’s goal of their emails looking more professional. The Office 365 platform uses ActiveSync which maintains the state of email across devices, so for example if you read an email on your phone, it will show up as read on your computer. This significantly improved the users mobile experience.

Office 365 is paid on a monthly, per user basis. This minimised up-front costs rather than investing in an on-premises (Microsoft Exchange) email platform. It is also flexible and scalable so can meet BESC’s needs as they continue to grow.

Solution Summary

• Hyper-V Virtual Server to run MYOB Exo on existing server
• StorageCraft ShadowProtect as the backup / disaster recovery solution
• Migrate existing Bigpond email history to Office 365 based email platform

Benefits of the Solution

• Costs minimised
• Met BESC’s goals
• Office 365 is a scalable solution that supports business growth
• Fast implementation of the IT solution meant that BESC were able to get started on implementing MYOB Exo into their business straight away
• Reliable and industry-standard solution

Our Expertise

MYOB Exo

• Install, deploy and manage MYOB Exo based products, including MYOB Employer Services
• Automatic deployment of MYOB Exo client to PC’s
• Optimize MYOB Exo to increase speed

Office 365

• Migration from on-premises email platforms to Office 365
• Day to day administration including provisioning new users, authorising new domains
• Implementation and support of all aspects of Office 365 including but not limited to Exchange online, SharePoint online and Skype for Business

Hyper-V

• Single and multi-server deployments using both internal and shared (SAN) storage solutions
• Automatic failover Virtual Machines in a Hyper-V cluster
• Automatic VM replication with Hyper-V Replica

Windows Server 2012

• Active Directory – single and multi-site configurations, ADFS, forest and domain trusts
• Remote Desktop Services – single RDS server, RDS server clusters, publishing RemoteApps
• File and Print Services – simple file and print sharing, multi-site DFS configurations