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Customer	Dakota Financial is an asset-based lender, focusing on funding trucks, trailers, construction equipment, agricultural equipment, and machine tools. Their national programs are specifically designed to provide financing for customers with prior bankruptcies, tax liens, judgments, repossessions, or slow pays. For Dakota, fast, easy access to supporting scanned documentation is very important. This digital data helps ensure that leases are properly approved and managed. Dakota currently funds and manages over 1,000 leases, with more than 200,000 associated scanned images.
Challenge	Michael Green, Dakota’s CEO, began searching for a way to migrate away from a costly, proprietary, document management solution to a solution built around MICROSOFT Office 365. Green wanted to focus on his leasing business so the right solution needed to be easy to set up and use in Office 365. On-premise scanning and integration with MICROSOFT OUTLOOK was necessary to create access to scanned images when users needed to work offline or did not have Internet access—meaning they could not connect to Office 365. Speed, streamlined document integration and easy retrieval were also important requirements to any solution. Green knew that Office 365 was the right approach after exploring alternative approaches. He found that most offerings not based on Office 365 required expensive licensing fees with storage costs as high as $20 per GB. Some of these systems’ annual expenses easily exceeded $8,000—for a basic image management solution. Green knew Office 365 was the right approach.
Solution	Dakota worked with DocuSource, LLC to find the ideal solution that could leverage Dakota’s investment in Office 365. After reviewing the online Office 365 Marketplace, DocuSource suggested working with SkyLite Systems and utilizing SkyLite’s SideKick365-DCM application. SideKick365-DCM is a robust system, built to support millions of items—in tens of thousands of case files—using SHAREPOINT 2010 in Office 365 or on-premise. It provides an efficient, cost-effective means to update and improve document management and organization for Dakota using Office 365, Office and MICROSOFT OUTLOOK. SideKick365-DCM integrates directly with KODAK Capture Pro Software for imaging and KODAK Truper 3610 Rotary Scanners. SkyLite Systems worked closely with Dakota and DocuSource to install and configure SideKick365-DCM in a few short days. Once SideKick365-DCM was configured, over 200,000 image files were migrated from the old system into SideKick365-DCM by SkyLite Systems over a long weekend, giving Dakota the power to start using their new imaging system immediately.
Results	The decision to pursue and smoothly integrate Office 365, SHAREPOINT Online, and SideKick365-DCM resulted in greater performance, new functionality, and significant cost savings. Benefits of the improved Dakota solution include— Reduced Costs: SideKick365-DCM costs $10 per user per month, and an additional GB of storage in Office 365 is only 20 cents per month. Dakota subscribes to the E1 Office 365 plan that includes SHAREPOINT Online and Exchange 2010 for $10 per month, per user. Savings continue to add up—with overall cost reductions of up to 90%. File access in offline mode: SHAREPOINT Online in Office 365 features deep integration with MICROSOFT OUTLOOK, allowing images to automatically synchronize to OUTLOOK for offline, disconnected access to images and important documents. MICROSOFT Office files can be altered offline, with changes automatically synced with SideKick365-DCM. Deep integration with MICROSOFT Office: SideKick365-DCM delivers total compatibility with multiple MICROSOFT programs, including WORD, EXCEL, ONENOTE and POWERPOINT. Users can save e-mails and Office documents directly into lease files from within Office and OUTLOOK at the push of a button. Unsurpassed security: Every item (including e-mails, documents and images) in SideKick365-DCM has permission automatically applied as it is saved into the system, so only authorized users can view stored items. Fast deployment: SideKick365-DCM can be deployed in a few hours to any Office 365 data center in the world. Peace of mind: Office 365 offers a 99.9% uptime SLA guarantee with teeth. Credits are given when Office 365 fails to meet the uptime commitment. SideKick365-DCM operates on top of Office 365, so it shares the same level of performance and reliability. Data backup is also included as part of the offering.

Office 365 and SideKick365-DCM deliver on the promise of savings from the cloud, while providing the familiarity of SHAREPOINT and the productivity of MICROSOFT Office—all within Office 365. Visit www.skylitesystems.com to learn more.