Approach Comunicação is one of the largest press and communication consulting companies in Brazil and internationally
With 170 seats on average, a company with problems in its local infrastructure, licensing and IT services. We led an initiative to implement and adopt Office 365 (Microsoft Teams, Exchange Online, SharePoint, OneDrive) and its local infrastructure for Microsoft Azure. Several long-term discontinued internet access tools such as Google Drive, Zoom, and Arcserve
Approach had 10 On-Premisess servers in total, keeping the operation running. This infrastructure lacked care and maintenance, since the client did not have a good team to maintain it. Among the services we can mention: Active Directory, File Servers, Remote Desktop Service, RRAS, SQL Servers, Backup Servers.
Migration of file servers to Sharepoint Online and adoption
Approach had two traditional file servers running on Windows Server. At the beginning of the project, the servers maintained a 10TB volumetry. Local infrastructure had been experiencing problems since unhealthy backups, internal network congestion, and access to files mostly to employees who accessed from outside the organization’s offices. For external accesses, a VPN structure was used through the Routing and Remote Access Service (RRAS) maintained on one of the servers.
Venha Pra Nuvem is one of the largest specialists in Sharepoint in Brazil and one of the few in Latin America to act on behalf of the FastTrack program. With a team specializing in adoption and a team specializing in Sharepoint development, a migration project started. A custom intranet was implemented in Sharepoint Online, tailored to the customer’s business needs. Following are graphs taken from the customer tenant showing the constant adherence of users to the use of the tool.
The adoption team elected and trained the champions within the organization, who replicated the knowledge of the organization. An operations team has migrated the files to a new intranet and continues to direct employees to serve new customers and projects using the tools available in Office 365. The use of traditional File Servers is increasingly abolished in favor of Sharepoint Online.
Over a period of one year the company had already adjusted its processes to operate using Sharepoint Online as a basis. At least 80% of users actively use the solution, not only as a file repository, but as a collaboration and central operations portal for all branches of the organization. Sharepoint has become the heart of the company’s operations.
Backup Services
For teams that create audiovisual content, having local files means time. While the contents are not yet finalized, the files are kept on local servers. For audiovisual content that is still in production and certain organizational needs of the company, the use of Sharepoint Online was not adequate. These specific workloads would need to be maintained on file servers with backups. Backup services were originally maintained by Arcserve software at both company branches.
The software had its license expired, servers hosting the software were no longer guaranteed, had no more physical space on their hard drives to store new backups, and sometimes file recoveries failed.
Venha Pra Nuvem has implemented Azure Sync Services on all file servers, creating a copy of all files for Azure Files. Azure Recovery Service Vault has been deployed to manage snapshots. For files that are no longer used in the operation, but need to be maintained by some aspect, Azure Archive Storage was used. With this set of solutions it was possible to:
Adopting OneDrive for Business
To assist with server storage issues, a OneDrive for Business adoption job has been performed. Venha Pra Nuvem realized that several files stored were personal or were not necessarily collaborative. On file servers, folders were created by employees to save their own files. Another scenario found was the use of Google Drive as a storage tool and WeTransfer as a file transfer tool.
A process of awareness and training was conducted by Venha Pra Nuvem for employees to join the use of OneDrive. The use of Google Drive and WeTransfer has been abolished and employees have started using OneDrive’s sharing capabilities. An average of 110 seats on average actively use the OneDrive and 540GB of storage were used in six months of use.
Adoption of Microsoft Teams
All Approach meetings were held face-to-face in their meeting rooms. When there was a need to communicate with their customers, virtual meeting rooms were created through Zoom, a conference tool from Zoom Video Communications.
The licensing of Office 365 purchased by Approach with Venha Pra Nuvem already allowed the use of Microsoft Teams. A matter of adoption of the tool was imposed on the case, with it, costs with other other communications tool and remote conferences would be avoided and Approach Comunicação would remain integrated with more resource in the Microsoft ecosystem.
A process of awareness and training was conducted by Venha Pra Nuvem for employees to join the use of OneDrive. The use of Google Drive and WeTransfer has been abolished and employees have started using OneDrive’s sharing capabilities. An average of 110 seats on average actively use the OneDrive and 540GB of storage were used in six months of use.
A process of adoption of the tool was carried out and the way of working of the company was impacted. Through the teams, one breakdown per customer was created, allowing employees to keep the documents and issues they discussed in the company separate, while centralized in Microsoft Teams.
Integrations with Sharepoint were made, allowing employees to have all the resources to work centrally on the Teams if they wished. The Zoom tool has been replaced as a solution for videoconferencing, and individual collaborators now make their videoconferences on their own computers, something not previously practiced in the company. And average 50% of seats actively use Microsoft Teams.
Migrating Servers to Microsoft Azure
With Office 365 and services provided by Microsoft Azure, several servers had been shut down, but there were still a few. Approach sought to modernize its troubled physical infrastructure. The physical servers were out of warranty, outdated, and redundant. Small problems created service outages and affected the operation instantly.
Applications, databases, and Active Directory have been migrated to new, upgraded servers in Microsoft Azure. The physical servers have been shut down. At the end of all the work with Approach Comunicação, only two servers remained connected, these being two
File Servers that temporarily store unfinished files that are being
produced by audiovisual content teams.
