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Patagonia is a global manufacturer of
apparel for outdoor specific sports
Our main mantra is to
inspire and include other businesses
that it is possible to do the right thing
from an environmental standpoint
and still be successful.
Technology is very important
in our business processes.
The speed at which people
expect to communicate
and to get answers
and to resolve problems
is getting tighter and tighter.
A lot of the challenges we face are
just keeping abreast of technology
as the business continues to grow
and demands change.
We knew we needed to upgrade from Office 2003.
Our business partner Dyeing Tech
contacted us about the Office 365 product
and the beta program that was available.
We were looking at a large capital expenditure
in order to completely upgrade
our entire Office footprint.
What a subscription model
the Office 365 gives us
is not only the ability to
smooth out that expense
but also to custom tailor
the expense per employee
based on what the employee actually needs.
With the Office 365 product,
we can rely on Microsoft
to take care of the infrastructure
and we can use our own internal resources
to be focused on more strategic projects
within the company.
By deploying collaborative technologies,
like SharePoint and Lync,
what we are hoping to achieve is
to truncate the decision-making process
across all lines of our business.
The thing that we are the most excited about Lync is
the way you can escalate something.
You can take something from a chat,
to a video conference,
to desktop sharing,
and quickly resolve any issues that come up.
Whereas, in the past
it took phone calls,
exchange of emails,
and now the time frame is really compressed
you can get all this done
in a matter of minutes instead of days.
We are specifically interested in OneNote
because of its ability to
electronically store note information.
The integration between all of the Office products,
including SharePoint
into OneNote
is very powerful
and we are just now beginning to understand
what kind of impact it might have on our business,
through desktop sharing,
online document collaboration,
and additional features within SharePoint, Exchange and Lync.
The new tool sets that we will gain access to
through the deployment of Office 365
will help us achieve our environmental goals,
in terms of reducing our carbon footprint
by allowing people to work from home
and remotely without travel.
I think the new enhanced Office products
will help us because
we won't run up against some of the boundaries
that our document exchange in the past
has been really relying on.
Having a centralized point where we can do collaboration
and quickly distribute documents around the company
will be a big improvement.
Our goals in deploying Office 365
is really to execute on the vision of our leadership,
enabling ubiquitous communication between
all parties across the globe
at the same time
so that everyone is executing against the same mission.