Client Profile
PointBridge is a consulting company that connects people to people and people to information. It builds award-winning collaboration and business intelligence solutions with Microsoft technologies including SharePoint, Exchange, Office Communications Server and SQL Server. PointBridge is headquartered in Chicago and was recently named the 2007 Microsoft US Central Region Partner of the Year and was a 2007 Microsoft Global Partner of the Year finalist for portals and content management.
The Business Challenge
As a consulting company to global enterprises, PointBridge maintains a distributed work environment spanning client offices and offshore developers. PointBridge had used three different technologies in order to communicate and collaborate across and outside of the organization. These included:
• Live Communication Server 2005 for instant messaging
• Live Meeting 2005 (hosted)
• A hosted phone service
The issues this communication environment presented were two-fold:
Cost: The nature of our work causes us to be communicating with peers, clients, partners, recruits or prospects at all times. The existing live meeting subscription was both a monthly cost and allowed only a small number of users to log into a live meeting at any one time. Further, teleconferencing was a separate technology and thus, a separate, and expensive bill with a per minute per user charge model.
Technical: Having a distributed and mobile workforce it is important to be able to determine not only if a co-worker is available to meet but for how long and in what capacity. User administration from a technical standpoint was also cumbersome. A new employee had to be given a phone extension, rights to instant messaging/email and a live meeting account. There was no way to streamline the process between the three disparate technologies.
The Solution
PointBridge was able to improve its communication capabilities through implementing Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS)2007. Given the nature of the increasingly mobile work environment implementing OCS provided PointBridge with enhanced presence capabilities that allowed the company’s associates to communicate more efficiently. The instant messaging (IM) client is typically the easiest way to reach out to a co-worker, but in the past it didn’t provide much more detail than whether or not someone was on line. With OCS you can use the IM client to see if a co-worker is available, the best way to reach him (phone, live chat, a short im) – and if he’s not available when he will be. The OCS client allows a deeper level of granularity as well giving full calendar rights to some individuals and groups and limited access to others.
These enhanced collaboration capabilities extend beyond PointBridge employees to partners and customers federated with PointBridge’s OCS environment providing one truly integrated communications platform. In addition, theOCS client is tightly integrated with SharePoint allowing PointBridge to further leverage its investment in the application – showing presence in particular. The workforce is also more global today – with meetings occurring on a regular basis with peers in various time zones and countries. For example, the benefits of web-conferencing included with the OCS client created more efficient meetings with PointBridge consultants in Pune, India. Employees feel more connected and involved when you can view one another in real-time.
Solution Benefits
• A single interface for email, phone, instant messaging, audio and video conferencing leading to decreased administrative burden for user provisioning
• Approximate cost savings of $20,000 annually through integration of communication technologies
• Ease of end-user adoption due to familiarity of OCS client interface with existing IM applications and federation with external parties
About PointBridge
PointBridge (www.pointbridge.com) is a consulting company that connects people to people and people to information. We build award-winning collaboration and business intelligence solutions with Microsoft technologies including SharePoint, Exchange, Office Communications Server and SQL Server.
PointBridge is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and was recently named the 2007 Microsoft US Central Region Partner of the Year. PointBridge was also honored in 2005 as the worldwide Microsoft Partner of the Year for Advanced Infrastructure Solutions and won the Microsoft Exchange Solution of the Year Award.
For more information please call 312.334.1900 or visit www.pointbridge.com.