MMM Group provides professional consulting services for sustainable community, building, transportation and infrastructure development throughout Canada and the rest of the world. To maintain a leading edge in a competitive engineering services market, the company focuses on providing employees with the tools they need to work effectively. The company wanted to provide staff with easier access to drawings, contracts and other documents. MMM Group also wanted to reduce the amount of time the IT department spent on administrative tasks. To tackle this challenge, the company developed a strategy for re-vamping its technology environment, which included adoption of the Microsoft® Windows® 7 operating system. Staff is using Windows 7 to quickly access information, while the IT department is leveraging new time-saving features that will allow them to focus on more strategic goals.

RE/MAX Ontario-Atlantic Canada Inc. is a leading real estate organization in Canada with more than 8,300 sales associates and 330 offices. The company has aggressive growth targets and was looking to automate the tracking and targeting of potential RE/MAX franchisee candidates. Working with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, Brodie Computes Inc., RE/MAX Ontario-Atlantic developed and deployed a custom CRM solution based on Microsoft Dynamics® CRM. The Microsoft CRM solution allowed RE/MAX Ontario-Atlantic to standardize processes and improve support for their Franchise Sales and Development departments. Today, Microsoft CRM delivers deeper business insight into broker and agent prospects, helping head office staff make more informed business decisions.

Intelligent Office is a virtual office solutions provider with seven locations across Ontario, and plans for growth across Canada. The company provides entrepreneurs and businesses with executive office space and services such as professional phone answering and receptionist services. With an eye on sustainable business growth, Intelligent Office wanted to improve collaboration and integration across its locations in order to make better business decisions and facilitate additional franchises. After researching various technology options, Intelligent Office deployed Windows® Small Business Server (SBS) 2008 to help improve productivity and focus on growth. Today, the company is using Windows Small Business Server 2008 to automate paper-bound processes, enhance security, improve customer service and increase revenues by operating more efficiently.

The Printing House Ltd. (TPH) has been a recognized leader in the printing industry since 1961. TPH specializes in delivering on-demand quick printing for Canadian businesses. In order to improve service delivery, TPH wanted to improve staff collaboration and find a more efficient method to transfer information across its 70 locations. The company decided to standardize on the 2007 Microsoft® Office system, enabling TPH to take advantage of a unified set of industry-standardized tools. A key piece of the Office system deployment for TPH is Microsoft Office Communicator® 2007, which acts as a system hub for real-time communications. With the 2007 Office system in place, TPH is benefiting from advanced voice capabilities and desktop sharing – helping to enhance productivity. The company is also improving communications among employees for more efficient operations across the company.

Faxing is important for many businesses that need signatures, drawings, and other paper-based content. Open Text, which specializes in enterprise content management, has large customers worldwide who need rich fax functionality. To help them, Open Text enhanced its fax-processing software to work with Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010, providing a rich feature to augment companies’ unified communications environments.

Sagem-Interstar, a global leader and innovator in software fax over IP (FoIP) solutions, has tailored its flagship fax platform, XMediusFAX, to extend the Unified Messaging (UM) capabilities in Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010 with advanced IP-optimized fax features. With this solution, businesses can improve responsiveness, become more productive, and reduce fax costs, with a typical return on investment in only three to six months.

Payworks Payroll Services provides online payroll and human resource outsourcing solutions to midsized organizations. The growing firm was coping with system downtime and rising maintenance expenses for its legacy PBX-based platform and needed to reduce communication costs for its 100-member call centre, which receives up to 400 calls per day. After reviewing Mitel, Asterisk and Linux-based options, Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Objectworld decided to use a Windows-based platform using Microsoft Visual Studio® and the Microsoft .NET Framework. The new Windows®-based communications platform helps Payworks save up to $52,000 per year – while providing several productivity features that allow the company’s call centre and sales teams to respond to customers quickly and reliably.

With a growing business around Microsoft Dynamics® CRM, Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Assistus needed a way to streamline deployments and set clear expectations with customers to ensure optimal solution alignment, drive adoption, and eliminate unplanned costs. To achieve this, the company turned to Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step, which provides a range of tools and templates that cover Microsoft Dynamics solutions from presales to implementation and ongoing support. Now, with Sure Step, the company is consistently ahead on project-delivery timelines, avoids budget overruns, and effectively manages change requests. And because Assistus can store its project information, including custom code, in Sure Step as templates, the company benefits from economies of scale through repeatability, enabling it to improve margins or cut costs on competitive bids to win more business.

Horn IT Solutions is Whitby, Ontario-based IT professional services and consulting firm committed to helping Canadian companies achieve greater business growth. As a Microsoft® Gold Certified partner, Horn IT is leveraging strategic and marketing resources, which includes a dedicated Microsoft partner account manager (PAM) and deeper insight into Windows®-based technology roadmaps. The Gold Certified partner status is also helping the company develop its software product portfolio, grow its customer base and boost its profile. Based on recent achievements, Horn IT Solutions was a winner of the 2008 Impact Awards, which recognizes excellence across the large and diverse community of Microsoft Canada technology partners, for the company’s commitment to developing advanced infrastructure IT solutions on the Windows operating system.

A provider of comprehensive property information services for legal, real estate, government, and financial enterprises in Ontario, Canada, Teranet wanted to thoroughly integrate advanced mapping functionality with the land ownership and property transaction data in its Web-based GeoWarehouse® application. The company wanted to create visual references for its data and allow users to quickly and intuitively navigate and search between related datasets. After evaluating Microsoft® and Google mapping technologies, Teranet integrated its GeoWarehouse application with the Bing™ Maps for Enterprise platform. After an efficient and simple development process, the company launched its new location-based solution in February 2009, offering its customers advanced but familiar tools, an enhanced user experience, and increased value and service.