British multinational food processing company leaps into modernisation by moving to SharePoint Online
Solution Summary
This organisation develops, produces and markets ingredients for many sectors such as Food, Feed, Pharmaceutical and other industries whilst putting an emphasis on the importance of their employees, who are engaged, empowered, team-oriented and share a passion to create value through innovation, agility, and entrepreneurship.
Intelogy have a long-standing relationship with this multinational – Intelogy had previously built, migrated and supported their previous bespoke SharePoint Server environment.
The completion of this project took them one step closer to fulfilling their vision of a Modern Workplace and enabled them to see the many benefits of Microsoft applications within the Microsoft 365 suite. Access to products such as Yammer and Teams through their Microsoft 365 subscription have enabled more effective collaboration, increased business agility and has proven to be a great work tool for this modern and innovative company. Company-wide access to these products has also been instrumental in progressing their objectives to both increase employee engagement and organisation-wide response times.
Challenge
The headquarters were recently relocated to newly built offices, but their internal communication and collaboration remained dependent on the SharePoint Server 2010. With so much change occurring in other aspects of their business, they desired more modern, mobile friendly platform, and it became especially apparent that relying on their old infrastructure was problematic. Their servers hosting SharePoint Server 2010 were gradually beginning to fail. Much of the equipment associated with the maintenance of this server was outdated and unreliable, having all reached the end of their supported lifecycle. The previous Intranet was unpopular with employees due to a highly complex and difficult-to-manage information architecture with inconsistent and broken permissions, and poor data ownership.
These complications limited communication between the six divisional companies. After consulting with Intelogy, they decided to migrate their internal communication and collaboration workloads to a cloud-based SharePoint, which would be used as a platform for teamwork. Not only could the organisation escape the imminent issues associated with their hardware reaching the end of its lifecycle, but also created a great opportunity to modernise, reimagine and redesign a new Digital Workplace, removing the issues, complications and complaints that had plagued their previous Intranet solution.
Solution Strategy
The main goal of the project was to reimagine the company’s Digital Workplace to enable effective and seamless collaboration and to accelerate the decision-making processes. With Microsoft 365 licensing already in place, the organisation wanted to leverage the opportunities that this subscription provides, improve the return on this investment. Intelogy acted as both consultant on change management, as well as a technical solutions provider to deliver the following combination of solutions:
SharePoint Online – This cloud-based collaboration tool is designed with an emphasis on accessibility and storage across all device-types. It is a central intranet platform with advanced compatibility with programs in the Microsoft 365 suite, allowing co-authoring of files in applications such as Word and PowerPoint. SharePoint Online was implemented in order to empower the users to easily share and collaborate on visuals, documents and lists in real-time. SharePoint Online vastly simplifies the management of permissions, enabling users to grant access across the organisation, business divisions, or even with external collaborators. This level of control, as well as other features in SharePoint Online provide great assistance in complying with internal data practices as well as any relevant data retention and privacy legislation.
OneDrive for Business – This file synchronisation and sharing service was introduced to safely store personal work documents in the cloud. Moreover, OneDrive for Business can reduce a strain on local storage which allows for minimising expenditure on physical servers. In this way, the risk of data loss in the event of local hardware failure can be reduced, as the reliance on local machines is lifted. The files and folders stored in OneDrive are private until a user decides to share them, however by granting access to other users it becomes possible to work on them simultaneously. The host can track all actions of co-authors and stop sharing the files at any time.
As the organisation held several anxieties about failing hardware, moving to OneDrive for Business provided necessary security of important documents that may have otherwise been lost, compromised, or corrupted by hardware issues.
Yammer – This community conversation tool enables discussions and knowledge transfers across the organisation. Some pre-defined groups were created by Intelogy to make it easier for the employees to adopt this solution and instructions were delivered to ensure correct usage of the application. Yammer’s flexibility is part of its appeal, as it can be used simultaneously to create formal discussion boards but also enhance more informal discussions depending on the created groups. Yammer also holds several benefits over conventional email communication including heightening the visibility of messages across a given team or group without requiring manual input of CCs and recognizing correct email addresses.
Since adoption of many new business solutions at the same time often causes change resistance, Intelogy have future-proofed a solution based on Microsoft Teams so the organisation is prepared for the roll-out at a later date. All Intranet collaboration sites have been configured as group-connected Team sites.
Results
Intelogy were able to assess the challenges with the previous Intranet and propose and deliver a modern, agile, mobile friendly Digital Workplace. A new platform was created to boost consistent and meaningful communication across the group of companies.
Microsoft 365 provides and evergreen platform, with updates and new features rolled out with minimal consequence to environment, unlike the difficulties that may arise from changing configurations and settings on a physical server platform.
The risk of services being lost or compromised as a result of their failing hardware and the end-of-life support of SharePoint Server 2010 was avoided. The suite of services available under their Microsoft 365 subscription, will serve to address the most common communication and collaboration challenges within their organisation, including the difficulty of document-sharing and of having one version of the truth. The gained features allow direct, real-time collaboration whilst having highly effective methods of access management. Clever employment of Yammer groups in combination with OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online, enhanced the effectiveness of this digital solution.
The new Digital Workplace focuses on breaking down organisational silos which delivers advantages to both employees and customers. The organisation has witnessed a great number of changes and advancements in other areas of the business, and by working with Intelogy they were also able to bring this modernisation and agility to their Intranet, regaining its focus.
