Adelaide-based financial advisers Business and Risk Solutions (BRS) is growing in leaps and bounds through the cloud thanks to a virtual desktop powered by Microsoft SharePoint, with the help of MacroView and Citrix technologies.

BRS consultants located around Australia can now connect via a web browser to share, manage and collaborate on emails, documents and project-related data – via the familiar environment of Microsoft Outlook delivered in a cloud environment.

BRS uses a sub-contracting model for its consultants that are engaged job-by-job on an hourly basis to perform work for the BRS quality client list. Up to 20 additional consultants per job are supported by a core group of 8 staff that run the day-to-day business including marketing, finance, business development, and administration.

Kym Williams, BRS Managing Director, said: “To make this business model feasible you need a fully remote working model, with easy-to-use document management and systems that can scale up fast. By using cloud computing we allow our consultants to log on to any computer in the world and work directly on their virtual desktop.

“The other critical need is to minimise training time for new consultants, which we achieved by integrating Outlook with SharePoint using MacroView DMF. This enables very simple and easy to use document control - all a new consultant needs to understand is how to use Outlook.”

BRS now stores all its emails, documents and files in Microsoft SharePoint. MacroView DMF adds customisations to Microsoft Outlook so that each user can view and navigate the structure of the SharePoint document store and easily save or retrieve all types of documents.

DMF displays a tree-view of the structure of the SharePoint document store. DMF also provides a convenient interface to the SharePoint Search engine, which facilitates content and / or metadata-based searching for documents stored in SharePoint.

Project Coordinator Martyne Hamilton said, “Our consultants love the way MacroView DMF lets them drag and drop emails and attachments to save them to any area in our SharePoint store for which they have access permission. Thanks to DMF they can browse and search for all the documents that are related to a project while they work in their Outlook desktop. 

“SharePoint lets us maintain good control over project documents – so that everyone working on a project can be confident that they are seeing up-to-date versions and also be aware who else is working on a particular document.”

The BRS system was implemented in close co-ordination with another Adelaide based firm - Cloud Networks. That developed a solution based around Microsoft Outlook.

Damon Joseph of Cloud Networks CEO, said: ”By using Citrix we can allow each BRS consultant to access their Outlook desktop from anywhere in the world – simply via a web browser. MacroView DMF extends Outlook so that it provides an intuitive, user-friendly means of accessing the document management and collaboration capabilities of Microsoft SharePoint”.