Community Living Australia (CLA) is a disability service provider that operates in South Australia. CLA providing day services, accommodation services, respite care, in-home support and recreational camps to people with a disability living in regional South Australia.
With staff spread throughout offices around SA, CLA decided in 2014 to move to Office 365 offered by Microsoft’s Office 365 for non-profits program to take advantage of the SharePoint feature as a central document repository. CLA migrated to Office 365 with assistance from Infoxchange and shared the story of their migration at roadshows facilitated by Connecting Up, Infoxchange and Microsoft. Now, over two years later, CLA has given an insight into their most used features of Office 365 and the applications they want to try next.
Office 365 – 2 years on
The main feature that drew CLA to Office 365 two years ago, SharePoint, is still a major component of the service for them. CLA’s ICT manager, Naomi Newham, shared the appeal of SharePoint for CLA which is as true today as it was two years ago.
“We were initially using SharePoint as there wasn’t an internal website around. We wanted to use it for document storage, as opposed to shared drives which are hard to access for our external staff”
SharePoint isn’t the only feature of Office 365 that CLA is using though. Skype for Business is now commonly used, not just for the instant messaging feature but for its video conferencing capabilities.
“One of our goals is to reduce carbon footprint. We have three offices and we find that people travel to those other offices that are half-an-hour away for just a one-hour meeting, which is not productive. So we’re trying to push for meetings via video conferencing through Skype”
What’s planned for the future?
CLA have given some insight into what Office 365 applications they are looking to try next with Microsoft Planner and Yammer currently on the cards. CLA is looking to improve project-based collaboration and communication for upcoming small projects with the task management features of Planner and the communication functions of Yammer.
SharePoint remains a key point of their endeavours though:
“We’re preparing for the NDIS rollout here in South Australia, so collaborating on some of the projects involved in that, we setup those sites and all the documents for those sites are in one central location. We can also sync the files down so we can get them offline”
Community Living Australia offers services for people with disabilities in regional South Australia.