Marine Rescue Queensland adopts Office 365

Marine Rescue Queensland (MRQ) has deployed the Office 365 cloud suite to help better administer and train the organisation’s over 1500 volunteers.

MRQ contracted Microsoft partner Empired to revamp the company’s ICT systems to ensure more centralised administration.

MRQ has volunteers spread out across 25 individually managed, autonomous squadrons throughout the state.

In the past the squadrons invented their own processes, and there was no consistency and collaboration between groups. But this made it harder for MRQ’s few permanent staff to ensure that volunteers have all been trained to the same standard.

Adopting Office 365 has allowed for closer collaboration between squadrons and more consistency throughout the organisation, according to MRQ President Keith Williams.

“What Office 365 has given us is the ability to put everybody on the same page, for starters,” Williams said. “But it also enables us to create group-based aliases, so I can just send an email to all volunteers in a region now, rather than having to remember each individual person.”

MRQ is also using Sharepoint to distribute content relevant to all squadrons. The company is using a satellite-hub concept, whereby information is shared to all squadrons from a central hub. Each squadron then has its own satellite populated with content relevant to that particular squad.

“We didn’t understand the full usefulness of SharePoint at first. It started off with us being able to put a lot of our documents about our compliance out to everybody, now it’s evolved to include a lot of training material,” Williams said.

“What will happen is that we’ll end up with a system whereby people will be able to do completely self-based learning.”

Image courtesy of >littleyiye< under CC