Office 365 Migration Eases IT Workload & Remote Access for FNCB

First National Collection Bureau (FNCB) is a leading collection and receivables organization based in Northern Nevada. Through more than 30 years helping clients recover delinquent receivables and improve cash flow, FNCB has grown to more than 150 employees and expanded its presence across the country. As a growing company, FNCB faced a long list of daily email glitches, especially with sending and receiving emails, that kept users from being productive. Through an Office 365 migration with Agile IT, the company remedied these barriers to productivity and achieved other unexpected benefits.

The Need: Eliminating Daily Communication Setbacks

FNCB had long been using POP3 for email hosting. Working with clients spread across the nation, FNCB users experienced constant issues working with POP3 — both in the office and remote.

Emails would go missing or not send at all. Time spent resending emails quickly ate up valuable time, leaving team members frustrated and less productive. POP3 also created mass amounts of duplicate emails, which only bloated user inboxes and distracted from daily tasks. Users working from personal devices in the office had to use LogMeIn, a SaaS service for remote connectivity, to access their email because POP3 couldn’t support multiple devices.

“It became time-consuming to click and sort through emails,” said Josh Bisiaux, account executive at FNCB. “It wasn’t what we wanted in a modern environment.”

To eliminate these daily productivity pitfalls, the FNCB team needed a stable email solution that employees could easily access anywhere.

The Solution: AgileAscend Office 365 Migration

FNCB considered Google and other email options, but the team already used Office in-house so users were familiar with the platform.

“As a business, everyone knows Office,” Josh said. “Sticking with an Office 365 migration seemed like the most natural evolution for the team.”

Josh was also interested in incorporating SharePoint — Microsoft’s team collaboration software — in the future, which FNCB could get with Office 365 and avoid the costs associated with hosting a SharePoint server.

After partnering with Agile IT, FNCB chose the Office 365 E3 plan, which Agile IT would fully manage for the team. Through the collaborative AgileAscend Office 365 migration process, FNCB was able to:

• • Migrate 71 mailboxes from a Network Solutions domain to Office 365
  • Configure identity and password sync between the local Active Directory server and Office 365
  • Gain ongoing Office 365 support
  • Receive system and break-fix services from an award-winning Microsoft Cloud Partner

Overall, Josh and the team didn’t endure any hiccups throughout the process, making the move to Office 365 much less stressful than anticipated.

“The migration process was extremely quick and went much smoother than I could have ever expected,” Josh said. “Agile IT got most of the work done in a week or two and was extremely helpful throughout the entire process, which made it really easy on our end.”

The Advantages of Scaling With Office 365

Today, FNCB has fully migrated to and adopted Office 365 — beginning the company’s gradual transition to the cloud.

FNCB users are primarily using Exchange, Office and Outlook. However, Josh and the team hope to eventually utilize the entire cloud to make remote access seamless through Skype for Business (now Microsoft Teams), SharePoint and possibly Yammer. Although only a handful of employees regularly work remote, their work is critical to FNCB’s operations, Josh said.

SharePoint enables them to share and collaborate on documents as if they were in the office — eliminating the constant back-and-forth that quickly derails productivity. Ultimately, the scalability of Office 365 will empower the team to easily incorporate new business applications without the need for a costly migration or widespread user training.

From an administrator standpoint, the Office 365 migration shaved off hours of routine work for the three-person IT team — with the ease of adding and removing users and deploying new solutions. The ability to retrieve deleted accounts for up to 30 days has also been helpful for people returning to the organization.

Now, FNCB continues to enjoy added benefits of migrating to Office 365, including:

• Streamlining and consolidating all email and scheduling into a single secure solution
• Standardizing Office suite versions and eliminating the burden of manually upgrading
• Improving collaboration throughout the organization
• Migrating to Office 365 with minimal impact to the business

“Overall, users just seem happy with Office 365,” Josh said. “Email is much more stable, and all users can access email on their phones and laptops — making it easier to get in contact with employees outside of work and for them to stay plugged in.”

At Agile IT, we’ve successfully migrated millions of mailboxes to Office 365 and know what to expect. If you need help planning your Office 365 migration, we can walk you through the process. Learn more about our AgileAscend migration process, or reach out to us today!