The pandemic created a landscape in which a digital mindset is key and that will continue to encourage innovation and technological adoption. For a Belgian public transport company, it was the nudge in the right direction to perform a digital transformation. Devoteam helped the organization with over more than 10.000 employees with the implementation and integration of a Digital Workplace, resulting in simplified workflows, flawless remote work and several other advantages.
The challenge
The large public transport operator has over 10.000 employees and provides transport for over 1.000.000 inhabitants, in addition to thousands of commuters. For the company, it’s of high importance that all employees can do their job as efficient as possible. Therefore, the implementation of new ways of working was inevitable. Because of the pandemic all employees should be able to work from home within a minimum timeframe, in a secure and governed way after all.
Together with Devoteam, the public transport operator chose to perform a digital transformation towards Microsoft Cloud. The first step was to move a legacy Exchange 2010 environment with more than 10.000 mailboxes towards Exchange Online. In addition, there was no culture of remote working in place yet, and the current Skype for Business 2015 topology was not sufficient to facilitate a decent remote working experience for end users. Furthermore, the company was planning to adopt the other Microsoft 365 services in phases but due to the pandemic, the need for Microsoft Teams became urgent.
The solution
Devoteam configured a Hybrid Exchange which enabled the phased migration of the mailboxes towards Exchange Online, with limited user impact. Next up was the rollout of Microsoft Teams. The expert group of Devoteam was faced with an imminent deadline: the users needed to be able to work remotely as soon as possible. At Devoteam, we do not just implement Teams and present it to your business. The deployment of Teams could only be successful with maximum user adoption and training. To achieve this, we divided the Teams rollout in 3 phases. The first phase was the enablement of Teams for chat, audio and video. Next, we focused on the collaboration within Teams, and in the third and final phase we enabled the applications in Teams.
This approach provides a maximum of training material for user adoption and hardens the security before releasing Teams. To assist the user adoption, we invented a community of ‘M365 Friends’. The M365 Friends are a set of key-users within the company, to whom we provided extra training and gave the ability to create Teams. Because of this approach, a sort of self-service approach was set up. Employees can now contact their own key-users, without the need of an IT intervention.
Main benefits
Thanks to the digital transformation, the employees of the public transport operator can work anywhere anytime. The expert team of Devoteam implemented some collaboration tools with a simplified workflow and provided self-service capabilities that activate the tools business users need without the need for an IT intervention. The main benefits are:
- The enablement of teamwork and the simplified workflow
- Work anywhere, anytime
- Secured access to company resources
- Lower TCO
- Self-service capabilities
- Collaboration with external partners
The future
Devoteam will continue to support the public transport operator with their strategic cloud strategy. In the future, Devoteam will also help the company to replace Mobile Iron with Microsoft Endpoint Protection Manager (Intune), set up an application proxy to publish applications without the need of VPN and deliver aid to implement Autopilot. We will also help the public transport with an authentication without passwords and we will deploy Microsoft Room Systems in meeting rooms to facilitate hybrid meetings once the pandemic is over.
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