Case Study - Hawaii Behavioral Health

Hawaii Behavioral Health (HBH) is a leading Hawaii resource provider for community based educational, social and behavioral health services for children, adolescents and families. It provides a wide range of services from behavioral instructional and behavioral health intervention services to psychological assessments and intensive home-based services. HBH has locations on all of the major Hawaiian Islands, including Kauai, Oahu, Maui and Hawaii.

All of HBH’s offices statewide rely heavily on electronic communications, such as email or document sharing.

Problems begin to surface

HBH began with an in-house Microsoft Exchange server handling all email communications across the organization’s 175 mailboxes. When the server crashed it was evident HBH needed to consider a cloud-based managed service. At the time, HBH’s third-party IT vendor attempted a migration to a third party vendor hosted exchange service. The migration process did not go smoothly and office productivity dropped. In addition, backups were not configured properly, which took up bandwidth and impaired system performance.

According to Carla Gross, senior vice president/chief operating officer at HBH, “When we tried to merge our emails and contacts over, it was a mess. Emails were lost, sent emails would never arrive, and we lost a lot of productivity.”

A solution at hand

At the time of the server crash, Hawaiian Telcom’s relationship with HBH involved managing its voice service. As Hawaiian Telcom had proven itself a reliable HBH vendor, Gross asked if there was anything Hawaiian Telcom could do to help with HBH’s hosted exchange email problems.

Geoff Turner, Premium Help Desk Specialist for Hawaiian Telcom explained, “One of the big issues HBH had was employees would delete an email at home and then come into work the next morning and have to re-delete that same email. If they moved an email into a folder at work, they’d go home and find that the folder didn’t even exist.”

Recognizing that Microsoft’s Office 365 synchronization across all platforms could eliminate this problem, Turner recommended it to HBH. Said Turner, “Office 365 is hosted in the cloud and is a widespread integration. In other words, whether on Android or iOS or Windows PC, anywhere you can access the web, you can access all of your emails and documents and it is exactly the same on every device.”

Ready for the future

Microsoft Office Suite and Office 365 are well positioned beyond seamless email access across all platforms. With Office 365, Hawaii Behavioral Health can now do high-definition video and audio conferencing, screen sharing, instant messaging and presence, all integrated into its calendar across the entire network. With OneDrive and Sharepoint, HBH is also future proof. This enables HBH to have a secure repository for all of its data and to protect that data with data loss prevention policies.

With Microsoft Office 365, servers and content are housed in the Cloud, which consists of data centers located around the world. The benefits of leveraging the cloud include not just affordability, flexibility and scalability, but also convenience.

Explained Gross, “We don’t want to have our own servers in-house and were looking to have a managed service provider that we could go to and rely on for all our IT services. This implementation of Office 365 literally saved our company. Everyone was extremely grateful for how quickly Hawaiian Telcom came in and delivered on their promise and how Office 365 increased our productivity.

Hawaiian Telcom will guide customers through the migration experience to ensure that their move to Office 365 is seamless and smooth. Hawaiian Telcom’s approach is to assess, design and implement a plan to migrate your business to the cloud. HBH is a great example of what happens when you try to implement a Microsoft cloud product with the help of a sub-par vendor. Microsoft’s investment in infrastructure and cybersecurity safely and reliably ensure performance of Office 365 apps and security of data and reliably maintain servers, content and software.

Since this migration to Office 365 and the Microsoft cloud, HBH now has Hawaiian Telcom managing its entire IT network, including desktop, local area networks, and wide-area connectivity to HBH’s neighbor island offices.

“What started with Hawaiian Telcom supporting our phone service has evolved to them now supporting our entire phone and IT systems,” said Gross. “They were quite amazing.”

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