XCentral deploys Office 365 for real estate giant

XCentral has deployed 3,000 Office 365 licenses to the entire Raine and Horne franchise network.

The real estate agency was looking to use Skype for Business for meetings and staff training sessions in order to reduce time and costs.

XCentral sales director Angus Mansfield said: "Raine and Horne is using multiple services within Office 365 to enhance both internal operations and customer experience and we look forward to watching their business succeed and grow further."

Microsoft Australia director of Office Steven Miller said: "Raine and Horne have joined other new customers, including universities, top tier accounting firms and major enterprises and governments that recognise how the service can deliver productivity improvements such as remote working, collaboration and engaging with your customers and colleagues in new ways."

Raine and Horne executive chairman Angus Raine said Office 365 will benefit franchisees, agents and customers. 

"In the past, franchisees had to manage their own IT and technology environment. Now that Office 365 is fully deployed, we expect it will markedly improve communications and empower our agents in the field, enabling them to readily communicate with their offices and their clients from anywhere at any time," said Raine.

He added that to market itself as a technology leader "is an important step recruitment and retention tool, especially with young agents".

"The rollout has also enabled us, for the first time, to have simple things like a company-wide directory, making it easy for anyone to contact anyone else within the company – whether they be in our offices in Dubai or Malaysia or those in Darwin or Hobart," said Raine.

Microsoft has stepped up its fight against Google in the productivity suite market recently. In February, Microsoft expanded its FastTrack program to make it easier for SMBs to migrate to Office 365; customers with 50 to 149 seats will gain access to the suite of free tools to migrate clients to the cloud. Previously, only organisations with 150 seats or more were eligible for the program.

In September last year Microsoft started the migration of local Office 365 customers to its data centres in Sydney and Melbourne.