A Customer Speaks
In my previous post I looked at the increasing trend towards laptops and the problems that can cause for organizations of all sizes that are deploying SharePoint. I thought it might be interesting to hear this directly from a customer.
Here’s a quote from a case study on one of our customers, AAXICO, that sums up the reasons for deploying SharePoint, the problems of making it mobile and how Colligo can help:
In order to best serve its customers, AAXICO operates 11 offlices globally, with direct international sales teams. Disconnected from the Miami head office customer management application, international sales executives previously used Excel spreadsheets to track customer data. “Every Friday, each member of the global sales team would update their weekly report and send it to head office,” said Sergio Rodriguez, Global IT Manager at AAXICO. “This process was not only time consuming, but also prone to forgotten data and entry errors.”
AAXICO sales executives represent dozens of manufacutures that offer thousands of airplane products. The sales cycles are long and they must keep track of detailed sales activites. In June of 2006, AAXICO deployed Microsoft SharePoint to centralize sales and business development information and to improve the standardization of customer data. The SharePoint site allowed the sales teams to keep and share all notes in one organized and central point. AAXICO chose this hosted solution to provide global accessiblity from any connected computer and to avoid the maintenance costs typically associated with client/server solutions.
However, the user experience was very slow resulting from inconsistent connection speeds available around the world. “Because it often took four minutes for the site to load, adoption of SharePoint was limited,” explained Rodriguez. “We needed to find a solution that would drastically speed-up the user experience.” AAXICO sales executives, who spend 25 to 90% of their time away from the office, were also frequently unable to access SharePoint while on the road. AAXICO needed a solution that would improve the user experience while online and solve the offline usability challenge.
…“The faster user experience has been a huge benefit of using Colligo Contributor when online,” said Vieira. “Mobility is another. Now our international sales teams can use Contributor offline from anywhere in the world to update our SharePoint site.”
Barry.
