Reference
Coders Unlimited GmbH
How two companies with complex IT become one.
If you want to be successful in B2B business, you have to ensure that marketing and sales are optimally interlinked. In order to bundle expertise and synergies, the management consultancy Coders Unlimited GmbH merged with Xengoo Consulting GmbH in 2020. With its employees at the Erkrath site, the experts at Coders offer their customers holistic automation solutions - including the creation of websites. creation of websites. www.codersunlimited.com
Added value for the customer
Management Summary
The merger of two companies meant that the IT infrastructure had to be brought down to a common denominator. As part of the consolidation with Microsoft Exchange and the implementation of Microsoft 365, the way in which the company works together has also changed completely. Coders Unlimited GmbH uses a high potential of Microsoft applications to streamline overarching processes and increase efficiency.
For us as a small business, Microsoft products are simply the best and easiest to integrate solution. This means we can continue to work flexibly, easily and securely from home. We can coordinate at any time via Teams and with Exchange Online we have all our emails at a glance."
Project environment
The current success of Coders Unlimited was preceded by a merger: In 2020, Uwe Freese and Jan Steinbach, then founders of Xengoo Consulting GmbH , joined forces with their long-standing partner Coders Unlimited and its Managing Director Thorsten Scherff. The aim was to combine their expertise in marketing and technology in order to provide customers with comprehensive services in the automation of dialog and online marketing as well as the creation of websites. However, the merger of the two companies was not only accompanied by the pooling of knowledge and expertise, but also the merging of IT. The IT infrastructure in both companies had grown successively over the years and had always been geared towards the operational needs to be solved. The result: a patchwork of IT solutions and a completely different setup of tools in both companies. The team worked with this inconsistent IT infrastructure for over a year, meaning that employees had access to up to five different mailboxes on their PCs. In practice, this meant little transparency regarding email communication and constant switching between mailboxes," says Uwe Freese. "There was also no question of agile and collaborative working back then. We couldn't work on documents at the same time or share them with colleagues." In practice, everyone had to keep track of everything themselves. Due to the company's steady growth, Coders Unlimited decided to place its IT infrastructure in professional hands and integrate it on the basis of Microsoft 365 wherever possible. The ultimate aim was to merge two companies into one organization with a common IT system.
Project success
In the search for a suitable partner, the company became aware of IT-HAUS GmbH , which was moving into new premises in the same building. Together with the new partner, the first step was to consolidate the different email providers and move to Exchange Online so that email correspondence would only be sent via one mailbox. As the project progressed, the customer deliberately opted for the online version of Microsoft 365. This is because Office applications have already been learned from their own experience and are available as a standard solution. Coders also had clients with Windows 10 Pro, which also made implementation quick and easy. "This means that all employees can use the Microsoft 365 applications via the browser of their choice - and work together on documents," says Matthias Bender, Competence Center Leader Architecture & Consulting, Productivity & Applications at IT-HAUS. To promote collaboration even further, Coders Unlimited also decided to integrate OneNote and SharePoint into its daily work and to roll out Microsoft Teams. "Although we've only been working with these products for a few weeks, we've already noticed a significant increase in efficiency," explains Uwe Freese enthusiastically. "We can now access all files in the cloud at any time and no longer have to deal with the usual problems of a VPN connection."
Outlook
As part of a familiarization phase, Microsoft Teams will initially only be used within the company's own organization. In the future, there are plans to create separate project channels in order to make coordination and collaboration with customers or suppliers more efficient. "We always tell our customers that the implementation of Teams is much more than a purely technical change: it completely changes the way we work together. A Teams project is always also a change project," explains Matthias Bender. "That's why the main thing for us now is to define clear rules and processes for the use of Teams beyond video and chat," explains Uwe Freese. The great advantage of Teams at Coders Unlimited has become immediately apparent, especially during the coronavirus pandemic: today, employees no longer gather in person in front of the local computer in the office for short ad hoc votes, but instead call via Teams, chat or share their screen - almost as if they were just briefly calling across the desk. This makes internal communication much more transparent and better documented. This is because chats, files and much more are collected and stored directly in the right channel and can therefore be viewed by everyone at any time. "We are delighted with how smoothly the changeover went. We all know what IT projects can mean. That's why we plan to replace Skype and Basecamp with Teams in the future and move our data securely to the cloud."
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