Solutions

Early Music Vancouver

Early Music Vancouver – fostering an appreciation for early music and creating unique opportunities for performers, teachers, and instrument makers

The staff at Early Music Vancouver are eagerly counting down the weeks to the start of another busy season of performances. This year marks the fourth season for the non-profit society which presents the Vancouver Early Music Festival each year, featuring seven performances extending through the months of July and August. They also offer a series of summer workshops for artists who share a passion for this genre, and an interest in performing each piece in a manner consistent with the style and the period from which it originated.

In the lead up to the summer festival and workshop series, the staff of five are kept busy coordinating venues, assembling performers, hiring instructors, and creating and distribution marketing materials to promote their upcoming season. During the summer the operation expands to include a satellite office at the University of BC campus where the workshops are held.

The small office solution that keeps everyone ‘singing from the same song sheet’

With two creative streams to manage – the summer festival and the courses – over a short period of time, the group needed a better way to manage their office, coordinate information, and simplify their day-to-day communications. The adoption of the Sutus Business Central solution introduced Early Music Vancouver to an enterprise-grade phone system combined with advanced data and networking functions that would result in a more harmonious small-office environment. It would ensure that each member of the Vancouver Early Music’s team -- from directors, to volunteers and seasonal staff -- were all ‘singing from the same song sheet.’

An easy-to-manage system that adapts to the demands of each new performance season

Early Music Vancouver Executive and Artistic Director Jose Verstappen explained that prior to adopting the Sutus Business Central office-in-a-box solution, the team laboured under the limits of a cumbersome peer-to-peer network of PCs, each of which held a different email account representing a different course or festival program. There was no cohesive way for everyone to access program information, share files, or track email messages from the different program and festival streams. This made it difficult for staff to keep ahead of the growing number of inquiries, registrations, and other requests that accompanied each new season. And with no real network in place, the addition of a satellite office each summer made for a logistical nightmare.

All of this changed with the adoption of the Business Central, as Verstappen explained “In the past it was not even thinkable to have the two offices working in unison, unless you took a backup. But then you ended up with two parallel data drives and that’s a nightmare, having to work with multiple copies. Now we all work in real-time with the same data. And I’m able to do that from home as well.”

The Sutus Business Central not only brought early music online with email to voicemail conversions, it also made it possible to access both from outside the office. This made for a more flexible work-from-home structure that better suited the needs of this creative group. With the Sutus office-in-a-box, the group was able to pull all of their email into a single network with shared collaborative mailboxes. This allowed everyone, from administrators to directors, to share files and access data remotely from the satellite office, or from their own homes. “On the whole really the Sutus box has been a real life saver” said Verstappen. “It’s just so easy to just add whoever we want to the list and give people access to the system.”

New network features extend the boundaries of the small office - keeping employees connected, no matter where in the world they are

The new features also allowed the organization to retain one of its most valued employees, even after they moved overseas. “We had someone who ran the summer courses and, in the last two years was able to live and work from Amsterdam. They had access to local phone lines connected to the Sutus box in Vancouver and access to all the databases. So we had a satellite office in Amsterdam!” The ability to reach beyond conventional office boundaries to retain a talented member of the team without incurring extra costs was an unforeseen bonus for this close-knit organization. An additional advantage was the support that came standard with the Business Central office solution. Commenting on Sutus’ response to Early Music’s initial questions, Verstappen said “They are really wonderful with tech support and updates and the help function is excellent. You can find anything you need easily, and with the regular updates, it just makes it so easy to manage ourselves.”