How Gerald Edelman and Access Managed Services are enabling the digital workplace

The challenge

As an organisation, Gerald Edelman were looking for a highly responsive and forward-thinking IT partner, to help them keep pace with technology in a rapidly changing sector. They felt their legacy IT system wasn’t able to meet the demands of modern business, and was holding them back.

With a focus on implementing a new IT solution that could provide superb performance when accessing their business applications and allow for seamless use of Teams as a collaboration tool, Gerald Edelman engaged leading independent IT consultancy Jeremy Hyman Associates to conduct a competitive tender process to source a new IT service provider. They selected Access Managed Services to deliver their Digital Workplace Solution, largely down to the comprehensiveness of their solution and their experience in the accountancy sector.

The solution

Gerald Edelman began their journey with Oosha in early 2020 by first preparing to migrate IT support services over to our service desk, before then planning to turn to the implementation of the new Digital Workplace solution as a second phase.

However, the onboarding process fell squarely into the unprecedented changes brought on by COVID-19. So there was a rapid requirement to ensure all employees could work from home, which changed the scope of the original project plan.

The second phase was the rollout of the new Digital Workplace solution, which allows every user within Gerald Edelman to seamlessly move between devices, from PCs and laptops to smartphones and tablets. It provides full, secure access to the Microsoft Office suite, all key business applications such as CCH, Iris and Sage, as well as the collaboration tools and data needed to run the firm day-to-day.

In terms of the underlying technology, this included the roll-out of a Cloud VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) solution for all employees, Office 365 and Microsoft Teams for all collaboration and telephony - bringing the firm’s entire phone system into a single cloud-based Digital Workplace.

Every element of the solution is fully supported by Oosha’s service desk, including the management of end-user issues with any third-party applications.

Carl singles out the Cloud VDI system for particular praise, emphasising that it has made a major difference to the workforce, and especially for senior staff, who often have to deal with large workloads, while on the move.

The benefits

Working with Access Managed Services has helped Gerald Edelman enjoy improved outcomes in a number of areas, including:

The future

Gerald Edelman is now looking to rollout Globalflow – a solution engineered by Jeremy Hyman Associates to bring together data from across the various applications used by different service lines in the firm. This will give Gerald Edelman the ability to turn its disparate data into insights to help make more informed decisions.

We are closely involved in enabling the infrastructure for Globalflow to operate quickly and reliably, and this in turn will help Gerald Edelman to plan work, find data instantly, and generally service clients seamlessly and rapidly, through streamlined operations and workflow.