At Microsoft's annual Public Sector CIO Summit, we were pleased to announce a growing community of public sector customers who've adopted Office 365 including the City of Kansas City, MO; the City of Seattle; King County, WA; the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority, Dupage County, the University of Miami, the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, Sacramento (Sacramento State) and California State University  - all who've moved to the cloud to increase IT efficiencies while improving their communication and collaboration capabilities.

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As governments strive to become more responsive and transparent, it's important for them to make public information easily accessible to citizens. At the same time, it's critical that they protect confidential data.

A key reason why governments choose Microsoft Office 365 is Microsoft's leadership in the industry when it comes to privacy, security, and compliance practices. In short, governments know they can trust Microsoft to help protect their data.

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Financial services firm Goodbody wanted to leverage the power of cloud technology and needed a solution with robust security technologies. After evaluating Google Apps, it decided to adopt Microsoft Office 365. We recently spoke to Stuart Halford, Head of Technical Projects and Service Assurance at Goodbody, to learn why: Q: Please tell us about Goodbody. Stuart Halford : Goodbody is one of the oldest stockbroking firms in Ireland, with a reputation for expertise, innovation, and trust. We offer...

But what exactly is "enterprise-ready?" In a nutshell, it means that the solution was designed, tested, and implemented with businesses and their business needs in mind.

Microsoft Office 365 does exactly that. It takes the well-known and frequently used Microsoft Office productivity tools many organizations rely on-such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint-and delivers them as cloud-based applications. Office 365 is composed of cloud versions of Microsoft communication and collaboration services-including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Lync Online. The result is an enterprise-ready set of productivity tools that make it possible for businesses to do more with less.

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Play and Learn, which provides early education and childcare services, wanted to better coordinate activities across its 10 locations. The nonprofit worked with Microsoft Partner BlueEdge Consulting to seize an opportunity to upgrade its productivity and communication tools by moving to Microsoft Office 365. Now, employees can easily share calendars and documents-while the organization benefits from reduced technology costs, simpler IT management, and improved disaster recovery capabilities.

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Every couple of weeks, we round up industry news and articles you might have missed. Read on for our latest selections.

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Since our founding in 2000, Facilium has become the leading e-field solution provider for the upstream offshore industry. We have more than 90 percent of the market, but we are continuously striving to improve and that's where reliable communication and collaboration technologies come in. Our work is global, project-centric, and time-sensitive. We need secure, anytime, anywhere access to information to serve our customers. But we had no instant messaging (IM) or presence capabilities. We used cloud-based project management software, hosted email, and Skype. We wanted to consolidate vendors and find a single, cloud-based solution that offered all the services we need. We found that with Microsoft Office 365.

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Founded in 1935, The Errigle Inn, has been run by the McGurran family. My father, owner of The Errigle Inn, has always been an early adopter of IT. As my role of managing The Errigle Inn has developed, I wanted to introduce more IT to support the business and to continue the foundation previously laid. We're busy seven days a week, with 75 employees working from 9 a.m. to 2 a.m., serving customers in five areas and hosting private parties, live music, and sporting events. With so many moving parts, it's important that we all know what each other is doing, but it was challenging for us to get together to work on pub business. Instead of switching between different online tools like DropBox, and EverNote, I chose Microsoft Office 365 for its security-enhanced, cloud-based collaboration tools to improve teamwork, close communication gaps between shifts, and reduce the necessity for face-to-face meetings.

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The British Ballet Organization (BBO) trains students and teachers in the globally respected BBO syllabi. As a nonprofit organization, we organize courses and events locally, nationally, and internationally to enrich lives through the medium of dance. Working on these events was a challenge because we had limited collaboration tools. We had a shared file server running on an old PC in the office, and I worried about losing teacher, student, and event management information if a backup failed. When we worked on documents, versioning was always a nightmare, so we ended up sending drafts to one another by email. It wasn't very efficient.

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For the last couple of years, Amsterdam Housing has faced a competitive real estate market in the Netherlands. In our goal to provide "one-stop real estate services," we struggled with inadequate IT tools. Our team needs to work together to build customer relationships with professionals and their families, long before they arrive here. And once they arrive, effective teamwork and responsive customer service boosts our reputation. Yet, we had one shared email address and kept all our customer and business data locked in our PCs. It was difficult to share information and coordinate our activities to provide excellent service.

 

 

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