Odessa Group
Odessa Group/Ventures Inc., Heath Stone
The Odessa Group/Ventures Inc. is a busy construction company with employees traveling in and out of the main office and using remote or home offices. As such, Heath Stone of the Odessa Group needed his employees to have a more flexible and user friendly IT system that allowed everyone to check their emails and work on documents – no matter where in the world they were working.
In addition, Stone wanted all of his employees to be on the same series of applications so communication and alignment among teams could be improved. “We wanted a total consolidation of our technologies so we could collaborate more effectively,” he said.
GM Solutions installed Microsoft BPOS, which can help companies like Odessa Group with email, document management, collaboration tools such as SharePoint Online, and the most up-to-date software application tools from Microsoft Office. In addition, the solution also includes Microsoft Office Communications Online, which connects people via the Internet from wherever they are. If an employee is traveling, they can still access their documents, email, instant messaging and even engage in live meetings and video-conferencing from their own computer.
Deployment:
While the deployment is still taking place, Stone says, “The overall process was excellent. The team at GM Solutions, (led by Dan Crepnjak), were very understanding of our situation and asked us a lot of good questions. They came up with an excellent IT strategy that we could implement relatively easy and without too much interruption to our work.”
In addition, Stone felt that the GM Solution team did a good job training the Odessa Group employees so that everyone could be up and running fairly quickly. “Dan really understood that our employees are at different levels of technology savvy and they took their time to get everyone up and running.”
The Result:
Stone says the results so far have been excellent. Currently all employees can access their email and Microsoft applications remotely. They are currently finishing up with the installment of SharePoint – which will provide Odessa with an intranet platform that will allow collaboration on a whole new
level. This includes a company intranet where employees can post and manage important information and documents.
“As we learn to use the new tools, I am positive we will evolve and probably want to even expand our technical capabilities,” said Stone. “Dan and the GM Solution team were excellent – very customer focused and results oriented,” Stone continued. “They really are a great group of people.”
