CUSTOMER PROFILE

SW (formally ShineWing) is an Australian owned advisory and accounting firm established in Victoria, 1976. Over the past 45 years it has grown its team to over 10,000 professionals in 80 offices across 14 countries and regions.

Their core expertise is extensive, providing services in assurance, business advisory, corporate finance, tax, private clients, and wealth management services.

THE CHALLENGE

In 2020, SW Australia engaged Insync Technology – a Rapid Circle company as part of a complete technology revamp, migrating their 380 corporate users across Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane to one integrated platform (Microsoft 365) from multiple legacy and on-premises solutions – some over 10 years old.

Head of Information Technology, Barney Ling engaged Insync Technology – a Rapid Circle company for a strategic advisory to undertake a discovery and recommendations report on how to take their 100% on-premises environment to Microsoft 365 & Microsoft Azure.

OUR SOLUTION

Barney explained that Microsoft 365 was the logical cloud-based solution, “I wanted to reduce our change fatigue, bringing in a number of new lines of business platforms. People were already familiar with earlier versions of Microsoft software.”

“We were using legacy tools – Office 2016, Windows 8, and Windows 10, so I needed to bring in some experts to help uplift us. Insync (a Rapid Circle company) was a company that I knew and trusted. They had the expertise and were the appropriate choice for the kind of challenges I faced.”

Barney Ling

STAGE 1: DEVELOPING A ROADMAP AND GOVERNANCE PLAN

A Roadmap and Governance plan was created to guide SW on their journey to Microsoft 365 – but COVID placed this on hold mid-March . We pivoted the project to a more tactical solution to focus on a transition to a cloud-based environment to enable secure remote work. The initial stages focused on:

• Migrating their email of their on-premises Exchange environment to Exchange Online
• Completing a Teams Rapid engagement to securely enable Microsoft Teams for all SW Australia users
• Roll-out Multifactor Authentication and Conditional Access to all staff to protect IP and staff from external vulnerabilities and threats and to ensure credibly and authorised access to SW platform

STAGE 2: TEAM ENGAGEMENT AND CHANGE MANAGEMENT

As part of the Teams Rapid engagement and migration to cloud technology we conducted virtual training which leveraged their skills from previous tools and assisted in a smooth change journey. Each session was determined by pain-points raised by employees and was incorporated into the SW’s Teams environment through adoption tips and “drop in” Q&A channels. This iterative feedback model allowed Insync (a Rapid Circle company) to address key points for SW in terms of business process and how best to derive value from Teams.

THE OUTCOME

Building on our tactical success of keeping the business working in June 2020 we were successful in winning the engagement to take SW Australia to Teams Calling through our new service VoiceX.

VoiceX was the catalyst to eliminate handsets and unifying all communication tools within their organisation.

“The shift from our legacy platform to VoiceX and integration of our communication platforms through Teams has made things seamless.
Instead of having multiple platforms and devices we now just have the one.”

— Barney Ling

After COVID response had stabilised and the business was on a sure footing, Insync (a Rapid Circle company) continued to build out a M365 Roadmap for SW Australia and our applied governance solution to ensure that SW Australia’s information remained secure and the setup in line with best practices. As part of our Governance solution, SW receive ongoing updates on relevant new features and guidance on how to optimise their Microsoft 365 environment.

In early March 2021, SW Australia was one of the first adopters of our Guest Manager for Microsoft 365 service. Guest Manager for Microsoft 365 was designed with organisations like SW in mind to improves the experience of guests, users, administrators, as well as making your organisation more secure and compliant.

At present, Insync (a Rapid Circle company) are utilising the Microsoft FastTrack Rooms program to modernise the meeting experience for staff at SW offices which will help further optimise their Microsoft Teams meeting experience. SW are “all in” on Microsoft 365 and this will fuel the next phase of growth in employee and customer experience.