Kauffman Tire, a multi-state wholesale tire distributor and retailer, sought to minimize the cost and effort of providing email and document store to their employees. After examining several options, they decided to move forward with a cloud solution. Kauffman Tire selected Office 365 based on the familiar Microsoft interface, ease of transition it represented and favorable license structure. In addition, they liked the configurable features of SharePoint. By moving to the cloud, Kauffman Tire could minimize the on-premise hardware needed to provide the necessary business capabilities of email, collaboration and document sharing, as well as replace file server and public folders. Kauffman Tire needed to move quickly as their existing open source email solution, was beginning to lose stability and experiencing regular outages. After considering several partners with the advisory input of KPMG, Kauffman Tire selected Intellinet to assess their technical environment and help them plan an Office 365 Migration. Kauffman Tire enlisted the help of Intellinet to remediate the current state of their Active Directory environment as well as plan and execute a smooth and successful configuration of Microsoft Office 365. Intellinet's project approach was to employ best practices developed as a Microsoft Online Services Cloud Accelerate Partner for environment assessment and Office 365 preparation and migration planning. During the Envision & Planning phase, Intellinet interviewed stakeholders to determine the company's needs, yielding a roadmap for migrating to Office 365 SharePoint Online. Intellinet ran Microsoft-recommended and Intellinet proprietary tools to assess Kauffman Tire's technical environment including Active Directory, Servers and PCs, and helped them remediate as needed to prepare for their Office 365 migration.
A key initial business goal was to expedite support of retail users' document-sharing needs by configuring a department site onto which Kauffman Tire could begin migrating content immediately. During the second phase of the project, Intellinet designed and developed the wholesale, commercial and back-office department sites. Since one of Kauffman Tire's desired outcomes was a seamless single-sign-on user experience, Intellinet remediated foundational Active Directory issues and reviewed the implemented Active Directory Federation Services. Finally, Intellinet provided knowledge transfer to Kauffman Tire's IT staff and documented its recommendations to facilitate long-term client success. Since the migration to Office 365, Kauffman Tire has not experienced email outages and Kauffman Tire's IT staff has been spared their prior frustrations related to keeping core business communication and collaborations capabilities online. By moving to SharePoint Online in Office 365, Kauffman Tire has realized opportunities for storage savings via consolidation of redundant files and important files are now secure and widely available to meet their business needs.
