Decovry: with Microsoft 365 (Office 365), all our documents are in one central place

Decovry, a platform for discovering new design products, opted for online working with Microsoft 365 (Office 365) at Combell. This business in Ghent, which is enjoying rapid international growth, was primarily looking for a place in which its huge number of files would be accessible to all its collaborators.

Online working with Microsoft 365

Daily quest for new design products

The Decovry website, a platform created in 2011 by Carole Meert, lives and breathes style. Its business concept revolves completely around design. A team of employees (aka design scouts) traverse the entire world on a daily basis to seek out new products. These are then offered for sale via the website for a short-term period of 7 days.

This is the way in which Decovry members, who are also passionate about design, become acquainted with these new design and lifestyle products. Steven Coppens, Managing Director: “With Decovry as their guide and curator, our members no longer need to search large portals or social media themselves to find beautifully designed objects. And what is more, they can enjoy special discounts throughout the week.”

But at the same time, Decovry forms a springboard for designers to get themselves more widely discovered. Up-and-coming design brands gain more visibility for their objects, and their products are picked up throughout the whole of Europe. This means that Decovry is a two-way vehicle from which both design fans and designers can benefit.

At the beginning of 2020, Decovry took an important step with the takeover of industry peer Monoqi. With 5 million users, it is currently the market leader in the European design market.

5 million users… That calls for a smooth operation

The exploratory searches and their processing produce an enormous quantity of files: photos, product files, information from designers, user data, and so on. A few decades ago, this would have resulted in overstuffed offices with full to bulging archive cabinets. Fortunately, those days are long gone already. Not only is it a lot more beneficial to digitise documents from an economic and ecological viewpoint, but it also constitutes a great leap forward for collaborative working. It means you always work with the latest version of a document, and are able to do that either in the office, at home or on the road.

Once the digitisation option has been taken, it is just a case of choosing the right tools that enable everyone to work comfortably and navigate their way around the files. And Microsoft 365 gives you the solution for all that.

Microsoft 365: worry-free central storage space

Decovry was already using Office through purchased licences. Microsoft’s Office suite indeed provided the 13 permanent employees with the necessary productivity tools but failed to solve the biggest problem: one central place where all files are accessible to all employees – wherever or whenever they want to work, and on whatever device.

For that reason, Decovry switched over to Microsoft 365 (Office 365) with Combell in 2016. With Microsoft 365 at Combell, you are entitled to storage space of 1 TB in OneDrive for each user licence. And if that is not enough, you can expand this easily via the Combell dashboard. This gave Decovry the solution it needed: all documents centrally located, accessible to all employees, and always in sync.

Microsoft 365 (Office 365) at Combell is an easy way to run Office: no more worries about updates or synchronisation – Steven Coppens, Managing Director, Decovry

Microsoft 365 provides you with all the tools for productive working

If, like Decovry, you go for the Business Standard option, then your employees can download the requisite components of the Office productivity suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, etc.) onto their own computer, tablet and smartphone. As standard, 5 devices are allowed per user, but you can adapt this (upgrade or downgrade) depending on the number of users. This enables them to continually work in the environment with which they are familiar. And when they are travelling, they can log in to the online version of these tools. Naturally, it is still possible to work offline too, provided all the documents can be downloaded.

Not only do your collaborators have access to their e-mail all the time from anywhere via Outlook, but their e-mails are also synchronised on all devices automatically. As an extra facility, at Combell you can have an unlimited number of e-mail addresses linked to your domain name and a daily backup will be taken of your e-mails. This means you will never lose a single e-mail, even in the event of a computer crash!

Online cooperative working is also managed smoothly and flexibly: via shared agendas, your collaborators can see when colleagues are free, which greatly facilitates the scheduling of meetings. Shared to-do lists keep them up to date on the status of projects, so that they can coordinate their own work correspondingly.

Rapid help with problems

But even if you do not need all these tools immediately, Microsoft 365 at Combell is still the best way to work more efficiently and productively. And one or several tools will provide you with the solution you are seeking to your specific problem. For example, it could be collaborating on documents, coordinating each other’s agendas, having presentations always close at hand, being up to date with the correct figures, etc. For Decovry, it was finally getting all documents centralised in OneDrive so everyone had access to them.

The transfer of their offline licences to Microsoft 365 at Combell went smoothly. During this period, the account manager allocated to Decovry by Combell was ready to provide assistance and advice and was available every day.

Today is no different: if Decovry’s employees hit a problem, help is immediately provided. ‘Combell’s assistance and guidance is highly professional and fast in response. We do have our own account manager, but we do not have to involve him very often: the experts on the helpdesk assist us immediately, and in most cases their advice is completely adequate. But as Steven Coppens says, “If necessary they can escalate the issue”.

Combell’s helpdesk team does indeed consist of experts in all areas, and it is available 24/7. As a Combell customer, you are quickly assisted in this way and are less dependent on the availability of your own account manager. Steven Coppens: “Now that we have Microsoft 365, it is much easier to run Office: we do not have to concern ourselves anymore with updates and synchronisations to the latest versions.”

And that is yet another big positive, even if you have your own IT department. Your people do not have to be involved in these problems any longer, and they are free to focus fully on your core business – your application or service.

Perhaps Microsoft 365 (Office 365) at Combell would also be right for your business? In the meantime, here are 7 reasons to choose Microsoft 365. Already convinced or do you still have questions? Contact our helpdesk – our expert staff will be glad to assist you further!

Discover Microsoft 365 at Combell