The California Strawberry Commission (CSC) needs to deliver IT services to employees and several hundred member growers, shippers, and processors-despite an IT department made up of only one technical employee. To address this challenge, the CSC deployed Microsoft Office 365, offering highly scalable, enterprise-class IT capabilities for a minimal investment. IT staff are now more productive and can focus on projects that provide strategic value.

Carolina Realty Group, a family-owned firm with 27 employees, needed a more cost-effective way to access tools for email and contact management, file-sharing, and online collaboration. Company owners were particularly interested in eliminating the need to license multiple software products from different vendors, as well as reducing server maintenance costs. They were also eager to provide agents with anywhere access to updated client contact and property listing information. In 2011, the company adopted Microsoft Office 365, which provides a full set of communication and productivity tools delivered as a monthly subscription service. By moving to Office 365, Carolina Realty Group has eliminated nearly $30,000 in IT software and services costs per year-while helping agents provide enhanced client service.

UrbaCon General Contracting and its subsidiaries sought to replace Google Apps for Business because it was cumbersome to maintain and did not provide unified communications capabilities. Executives decided to transition from Google Apps to Microsoft Office 365. Now UrbaCon benefits from simplified IT management, improved network security, and the ability to support employee productivity from practically anywhere. 

Recently, we had a chance to talk with Heather Pierce, outgoing Director of Marketing and Communications of the South Carolina chapter of the Make-A-Wish Foundation and her successor, Megan Harding. We asked them about the organization's move to Microsoft Office 365 and here's what they had to say:

Office 365: What was the biggest communication difficulty that your organization faced before making the move to Office 365?

Heather: Having separate offices a few hundred miles apart and needing to share large files was a major headache for the organization before we moved to Office 365. Our mission is to grant "Wishes" to sick children, and we try to make the process as seamless as possible for the children and families we serve. If our two offices can't communicate easily, then it is harder to do our job and make these wishes come true.

Leading women's fashion designer BCBGMAXAZRIAGROUP offers premier fashion brands for women in more than 1,200 BCBG stores in 45 countries. When employees began running into issues sending photos and other large attachments via email, the retailer decided it needed to address its limited email storage issue by moving to the cloud.

"We are not a technology company and don't want to invest a lot of capital in IT," says Kent Fuller, Director of IT Infrastructure Services at BCBG. "We saw cloud computing as a good way to spread costs, pay for what we use as we need it, and make email-infrastructure management somebody else's responsibility."

Today, the County of Santa Clara in the heart of Silicon Valley announced they're moving to the cloud with Microsoft Office 365. They plan to upgrade and consolidate their multiple countrywide email systems for 15,000 employees in 26 public agencies and departments.

Previously, county departments made technology decisions separately which lead to multiple countywide email systems, redundancies and unnecessary IT costs.  The County of Santa Clara chose Office 365 because they wanted to provide their employees with new collaboration technologies to help better serve the county's residents.

The county's decision to move to Office 365 will allow them to not only save the county money, but help employees across departments and in the field to have familiar and secure tools at their fingertips.

After completing our research, we chose to move to Microsoft Office 365, with help from BlueEdge Consulting. One of the main reasons we selected Office 365 was the availability of flexible licensing options. By paying only for what we need, we can minimize our costs and still deliver essential tools to different groups of employees based on their job functions. After discussing it with Kevin Miller of BlueEdge, we decided to give our corporate staff the full Office 365 for enterprise version and provide an email-only option for our flight crews, who don't need all of the additional functionality. BlueEdge supported us every step of the way to ensure a smooth transition. Email is such an important part of our business, so it was reassuring to know we had an expert partner to guide us through the migration process.

Microsoft SharePoint Online has proven to be the most valuable component of Office 365. We previously used Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. It did not have the extensive search capabilities of SharePoint Online. That feature is an indispensable tool for BidPal because it allows us to create a wide range of internal applications. Our company directory is a good example. We now have a company directory complete with names, photos, bios, and job responsibilities. With a rapidly expanding staff, this is extremely helpful as staff roles, positions, and responsibilities continuously change. Each department has its own library complete with much-used templates, announcements, team calendars, and communications. This allows employees, new and seasoned, to quickly search for the most up-to-date documents and gives them a central storage and sharing point to collaborate on projects with team members.

One of the biggest reasons we chose Office 365 was the flexibility to mix and match plans to meet our employee needs. We chose to provide contingent staff with access to Microsoft Exchange Online-while providing full-time staff with access to Exchange Online and Lync Enterprise voice. The key component for us was Microsoft Lync voice integration with our email. We had been using Cisco Call Manager, but we needed to "future-proof" our communications infrastructure and Lync was able to meet our needs. Our IT partner David Bleecker, Managing Partner of The Bleecker Consulting Group, became a vital asset during our Lync implementation and our deployment went very smoothly. 

Danish luxury audio system maker Bang & Olufsen has just started using Microsoft Office 365 to bring its email, calendar-keeping, team collaboration and communication together under one easy-to-use system.