Home appliance rental franchise Mr Rental has deployed 500 seats of Microsoft's Office 365 around its 90-plus stores in Australia and New Zealand. Staff numbers total around 400, and an account has been set up for each store as well.

The project started with a proof of concept last December, Mr Rental CIO Brad Rappell told iTWire, and the progressive rollout was complete by March. The project was assisted by three Microsoft partners, each specialising in one of Exchange, SharePoint and Lync. This allowed Mr Rappell and his colleagues to concentrate more on business issues and less on the technology and plumbing side of the project.

The company was drawn to the SaaS approach for several reasons.

Not least was the fact that the company is a rental business, so it made philosophical sense to rent rather than pay upfront for software and servers. And being able to the vary the number of seats up or down is important, as Mr Rental has been experiencing double-digit growth for several years.

"I can do it in increments of one (user) and I can do it month to month," Mr Rappell said. It also makes it possible to test ideas with no capex required.

An important reason for picking Office 365 rather than an alternative such as Google Apps was that staff were already familiar with Microsoft's user interface. The company thus enjoyed fewer change management or training issues.

Outlook 365 is practically the same as Outlook on Windows, Mr Rappell observed, and the switch was practically seamless.

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Takeup of Lync was very quick, he said, with franchisees choosing to use it to talk to each other, or to hold regional meetings. Franchisees also receive weekly coaching and support via Lync in addition to the quarterly site visit.

SharePoint was perhaps a bigger change, but franchisees found it easy to access content. From a central management perspective, there's an added benefit in that SharePoint 365 makes it easy to see which franchisees are reading which documents and when, which has proved helpful in determining which of them needs additional business support.

SharePoint is also used to survey franchisees, a task that was previously outsourced, with the savings being reinvested in the business.

Another reason for picking Office 365 was that the entire package is offered under a single service level agreement - "no beta bits or labs environments," he said.

Furthermore, the cross-browser support coupled with the SaaS model helps position the company for the possible introduction of a BYOD policy.

Office 365 has allowed the business to do more for itself, Mr Rappell said. Examples include the marketing team being able to run campaigns and the training team producing and distributing its own videos - in both cases without the involvement of IT staff. This has allowed his group to concentrate on business initiatives.