August 2010
Provoke takes out two awards!
We were delighted to be announced as finalists in two categories at the Microsoft New Zealand 2010 Partner Awards this month. The awards are an exclusive event and present an opportunity for all of the New Zealand Gold, Certified, and Small Business partners, to get together and celebrate delivery of innovative customer solutions. It is also a chance for us to showcase some of our work, and to talk about the achievements of the year with our peers.
We were finalist in two categories this year, the Citizenship Solution of the Year and the Online Services Partner of the Year, and we were absolutely thrilled to take out both of them. The awards for us represent a significant achievement and the recognition of excellent service delivery to our customers.
Every project we undertake follows a strict method that we have developed over 9 years of working with a huge range of customers across New Zealand. Our aim is to ensure a consistent quality of delivery every time, and whilst every single project is different, we believe that our user-centred design approach leads to better customer results. The submissions for the 2010 Partner Awards were no different.
The Citizenship Solution of the Year submission related to a complete rebuild of the public web site for the Child Cancer Foundation. We approached the design having completed detailed user research around the not-for-profits sector, and the most effective way to drive on-line donations. The application platform selected was the Kentico CMS for ASP.NET, as this was a platform that we had extensive experience with, and Kentico had offered to sponsor the licence costs saving the charity money. The entire project was completed over a 9 week period from analysis right through design, development and testing, and to deployment of the production release.
The Online Services Partner of the Year submission related to our work with the New Zealand Rugby Union. This project was focussed on moving the NZRU onto the Microsoft Online Services platform without any noticeable disruption to the user base, and maintaining the seamless integration to Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Office. To complete the successful migration we had to set-up a solution that provided archiving to the cloud, large mailbox migrations and synchronisation of mobile devices. This all resulted in the establishment of a hosted Exchange 2010, SharePoint 2010, Office Communicator and Hosted Archiving solution, that not only guaranteed the same user experience, with no additional user training requirements, but that also improved productivity and internal collaboration.
We are already in full swing on similar projects that leverage our track record in design, and in the provision of cloud-based solutions, and look forward to next year's awards.
Phil Whitehead, Account Manager
NZFS | Station Management Station »
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