10 April 2017

Microsoft Office 365 has made its debut at the National Theatre. The cloud system aims to improve internal communications as well as staff collaboration using a new mobile toolset.

As part of its continuing migration to the cloud, the National Theatre (NT) has chosen Navisite to help with the implementation and management of Microsoft Office 365. The deployment replaces an on-premise Exchange platform which had capacity issues.

By migrating its Microsoft systems to the cloud, it’s claimed the NT will be able to quickly scale email storage according to demand and ensure critical emails are delivered. Navisite says the switch to Office 365 will also enable better internal communication for the organisation as well as collaboration using a new mobile toolset.

A large proportion of the NT’s staff are craftspeople, designers and technicians, and their work is often removed from a traditional desktop PC environment. Despite this, Navisite says the National Theatre’s legacy solution was not suited for mobile. With more collaborative, mobile-friendly software environments and reliable email services, it’s claimed the organisation will be better able to improve employee engagement and unify a diverse workforce across departments.

“We wanted to take advantage of the fact that cloud computing now makes it possible to put data, servers and compute facilities off-premises, with someone else managing it,” says Jon Cheyne, IT director at the National Theatre.

“Implementing Office 365 is the next step in our cloud journey. It will help shift the role of our in-house team from trying to keep up with and maintain technology to actually operating and looking at how the benefits of the technology can be utilised.”

Navisite also offered the NT Proofpoint as part of its solution to meet business continuity needs.