Press Association

As Core has vast experience with migrations to Office 365, we felt we were in safe hands and as if nothing was too much trouble for them.

David Reed IT Services & Infrastructure Manager, The Press Association

Overview

• National news agency for the UK and Ireland employing 50 staff
• Leading multi-media content provider across web, mobile, broadcast and print
• For over 145 years they have provided fast, accurate feeds of text, data, photos and video

Based in London, The Press Association (PA) is a leading provider of multi-platform content solutions across a broad range of industries and 145 years on its standing and reputation as a national news agency remains unmatched. Up a few months ago they were struggling with a technologically outdated desktop infrastructure that was in desperate need of an upgrade to a more usable and robust system.

“Our communications and collaboration system was becoming a challenge to manage effectively and efficiently” says David Reed, Head of IS and Infrastructure “The PA agreed it would be more cost-effective to upgrade to a unified, secure and stable platform”. After a review of the different possibilities and options available, a decision was made to exploit the latest cloud-based technology in order to reduce costs and improve performance and staff productivity.

Leading cloud partner

Working with Core, one of Microsoft’s leading Cloud Accelerate Partners, The Press Association were able to migrate to Microsoft Office 365 exploiting Exchange Online and Active Directory Federation Service to provide single sign-on.

“Initially it was crucial for the PA to move to the Cloud at its own pace, implementing a hybrid environment” says Reed, “By working with Core we were able to do this and benefit from their excellent expertise and advice as needed.”

The PA were looking at moving not only their email to the cloud but additional systems and applications which were located across organisational boundaries. They also wanted to offer employees single sign-on access to enable anywhere working. Through Core’s knowledge and vast migration experience they were able to embed the new technology with little or no problems.

Under Core’s guidance

“As Core has vast experience with migrations to Office 365, we felt we were in safe hands and as if nothing was too much trouble for them”. Staff feedback to the new system has been consistently high with many praising its user friendly and flexible working methods. “Key to this popularity is the 25 Gigabyte mailboxes which is vital when dealing with vast quantities of multi-media content” states David Reed. “The addition of a single sign-on has also given staff access to their messages from anywhere, whether that is at home, through a public Wi-Fi connection or on a customer’s site”.

Summarising the move to Office 365 with Core, Reed stated “We now have a system that is working well and is much more stable, cost effective and reliable than the previous model”. Following the success of The Press Associations move to the Cloud a further migration of Meteogroup, the weather forecast division has also taken place.