Case Studies Strategic Upgrades to Communications Platforms for Non-Profit

Strategic Upgrades to Communications Platforms for Non-Profit

Summary

For several years, Concurrency has been honored to assist in IT strategic planning and implementation at the national headquarters of Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS), headquartered near Milwaukee, WI. With long-term clients such as WELS, Concurrency works hand-in-hand with IT leaders to structure, implement, and continually update a strategic plan to maximize value in the organization’s technology investments. Recently, the roadmap included a roll-out of the latest upgrades to the Microsoft communications platforms Exchange and Lync.

Solution

Exchange. Previously, WELS was running Exchange 2007 on physical servers located at its headquarters location. As part of a strategic shift toward more robust backup and functionality in case of a business disruption, Concurrency helped WELS deploy Exchange 2010 not onsite but rather at a data center co-location. This site also hosts WELS’ SharePoint environment. A secondary server onsite was deployed to replicate the main server, for a significant reduction in business continuity risk. In addition, Concurrency helped WELS implement email archiving tools built-in to Exchange, to reduce mailbox sizes and ease pressure on limited storage and backup systems. These upgrades were entirely virtualized, with no new hardware required.

Lync. WELS was previously running Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) with instant messaging and wished to benefit from the features available in Lync Server. Concurrency helped WELS implement this upgrade and take advantage of organization-wide instant messaging, rich presence information, file transfer, and voice and video communication. The Lync implementation allows WELS personnel to connect from mobile devices and either inside or outside the organization’s firewall. The result is simplified and faster communication.

“Concurrency has been an invaluable asset in almost all of our Microsoft enterprise solution rollouts. We don’t have the in-house staff necessary to offer these essential software services to our users. With Concurrency we do. We regard them as ‘a member of the team.’” – Martin A. Spriggs, Chief Technology Officer, WELS