Rackspace Managed SharePoint
Document Management challenges
“Say you’re responsible for a mine expansion, you would usually have hundreds of contractors, thousands of people involved,” said Edwin Elmendorp, President Cadac Group Americas. “From a document management and control point of view, you’re talking about massive amounts of collaboration, transactions, documents, approvals, reviewing, rejecting. All participants have to be up to date and informed. And the project must stay compliant with the rules and regulations.”
SharePoint based document management and control solution
When engineering and architectural demand surged for Microsoft SharePoint based document management and control solutions, Cadac Group began focusing on delivering business value for that industry, delivering a SharePoint based document management and control solution, Cadac Organice DCS.
Lifting barriers to productivity
For a number of reasons, IT departments often are unable to provide a professionally managed SharePoint environment. Lacking SharePoint knowledge, they’re often forced to hire costly and unreliable external resources, driving costs upward. For security reasons, IT departments may also be reluctant to provide extranet access. These and other factors can transform what should be a simple document control solution into a larger IT discussion.
By building its SharePoint capabilities with Rackspace assistance, Cadac Group has also been able to deliver out-of-the-box simplicity, big brand credibility, and time-saving compliance to clients. “We have made a very conscious choice to select Microsoft SharePoint to provide this service on,” said Elmendorp. “Based on years of experience in the engineering industry, we have developed best practices. These allow us to reduce throughput times and associated configuration costs.”
Combined expertise
Cadac Group can devote time and resources elsewhere, responding more quickly to customer queries. Rackspace Managed SharePoint allows Cadac Group to minimize administration and security concerns. “By combining the expertise of Cadac Group and Rackspace, Cadac Group is able to provide customers the best cloud-based solutions for engineering document management and control in the market,” said Paul Smeets, CTO, Cadac Group.
Maximizing rackspace support for a specialized industry
Rackspace also is Cadac Group’s hosting partner for the Cadac Organice Cloud solution, and its engineering document management and control on SharePoint in the cloud.
“Rackspace allows Cadac Group to deliver to customers who require IT a hosted option of our solutions,” said Elmendorp. “For many of our clients, keeping server costs to a minimum, or the ability to remain flexible drives the decision for hosting. However, our clients also require solutions that are reliable and secure. Rackspace offers superb and reliable 24-hour support and a secure environment, so we feel confident partnering with Rackspace to deliver solutions to customers that require hosting.”
Building relationships
Cadac Group believes in building relationships, taking particular pride in delivering a project on time, to the satisfaction of the client. According to Elmendorp, the Rackspace philosophy is similarly aligned.
“Within our Rackspace relationship, Cadac Group has two real important offerings. One, we have our own private cloud, which allows us to do a really quick deployment of our solution in a shared setting. Secondly, Rackspace gives us the expertise to run our SharePoint platform. They have the professionals, the 24/7 support — the whole offering. We can offer shared or dedicated hosting.”
Reliable business partner
For Cadac Group the desired end goal is having a reliable partner for cloud solutions in order to provide customers total engineering document management and control solutions. For the end user, success is having a cloud-based engineering document management and control solution that is secure and reliable.
“Rackspace has this theme called Fanatical Support; they really stick to it,” said Elmendorp. “Rackspace is a reliable business partner that we love to do business with, and we hope that this relationship continues to grow for a very long time in the future.”