Office 365: Helping Enterprises Across Pakistan

Microsoft has always been fixture in businesses and for good reason: the company excels when it comes to enterprise solutions. While we have seen a renewed focus on Pakistan by the company’s smartphone division, there are established examples where Microsoft’s enterprise solutions have had a measurable impact. Here, we look at four cases in order to highlight possible solutions to common business problems for our readers.

Serena Hotels:

Serena Hotels was one of the pioneering customers of Microsoft. The Senior Manager Information Technology at the Serena Hotels, Moiz Ismaili, said:

Our company has established 8 hotels all over Pakistan, and one each in Afghanistan and Tajikistan. The main goal of our company is to promote tourism in the region and to achieve the highest level of Guest-satisfaction in the hospitality industry.

The main challenge faced by Serena Hotels was that of inter-connectivity between the managers and staff working at various hotels, departments and operational sites. Email was the default standard and Serena cycled through various software solutions before deciding on Office 365.

Moiz Ismaili added:

We found Microsoft Office 365 to be the most comprehensive, secure, stable and unified system which fulfills the widest range of our communication and technology needs.

Online Hotel reservations are a very crucial part of Serena’s business operations and they have been tremendously facilitated with very high efficiency through the use of Office 365.

Habib University:

Prior to adopting the Microsoft Office 365 solution, Habib University was facing some reliability issues with email consistency and storage capacity. Senior IT Strategist at Habib University in Karachi, Mr. Ishtiaq Khan, said:

Habib University has been established to educate and train more than 200 students every year with 20 different faculties and departments. The whole campus has been equipped with a fully wireless computing and communications network to equip thousands of students focusing on several advanced research programmes.

Some of the technologies offered by Microsoft in use at Habib University are tools like Lync, Sharepoint, Exchange, and Office Web. Lync is by far the most integral as it offers collaboration, online meetings, web conferences, content sharing, instant messaging and polling all packed together in one package.

Sharepoint is another tool to store and edit documents on Sky-drive. It offers a capacity of 25 GB web-space and mass-storage for every user. It helps Habib University in creating My-Sites and departmental sites.

Waseela Bank:

Waseela bank is a market-leader in innovative branchless banking sector of Pakistan. It has focused its efforts to provide affordable financial services to over 70 million unbanked people in Pakistan. The bank is a social venture by Vimpelcom, which is also the company behind Mobilink.

While talking about IT solutions and how Waseela Bank arrived at Microsoft Office 365 as the platform of choice, Chief Technology Officer at Waseela Bank, Ghazanfar Siddique, said:

The main challenge for the bank was to provide a reliable, cost effective, collaborative and efficient platform to all its users. After thorough evaluation, Waseela Bank opted for the Microsoft Office 365 and became the first financial institution in Pakistan to deploy this  platform.

Evaluated criteria were: compatibility, reliability, cost effectiveness, user-friendliness, feature enhancements and value added services. Microsoft Office 365’s collaborative services like Lync, Yammer, SharePoint, Online exchange and One-Drive made it the best fit.

Siddique was also quick to mention positive feedback from the management teams and consistent support by the Microsoft team.

Sir Syed University

The Head of Information Technology at Sir Syed University of Engineering and Technology – Mr Abdul Moeed Khan praised the Microsoft 365 platform, stating that:

 

The university was previously using the desktop version of Microsoft Office, and the deployment of Office 365 has further enhanced our cost-effectiveness and performance.

Since the deployment of this powerful  solution, our users get very easy access to all the required data and they are able to swiftly manage their documentation and files, while ensuring strong communications across the globe.

Microsoft Office is a sophisticated platform with some unique features that provide great help in integration to enhance co-ordination between all our departmental operations.

It integrates all the Applications and Document-management tools, performing complex tasks through a simple, One-Window operation. Moreover, all our users can access this system from anywhere in the world.

There are many IT solutions available in the market, however, we have chosen and deployed Microsoft Office 365, after thoroughly evaluating its performance and features.

Based on my experience with various solutions and IT systems, I can personally confirm that we have made the best choice.

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