{"id":113731,"date":"2015-02-25T09:00:25","date_gmt":"2015-02-25T17:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/?p=113731"},"modified":"2024-08-30T16:31:27","modified_gmt":"2024-08-30T23:31:27","slug":"3m-races-forward-enable-enterprise-wide-collaboration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/microsoft-365\/blog\/2015\/02\/25\/3m-races-forward-enable-enterprise-wide-collaboration\/","title":{"rendered":"3M races forward to enable enterprise-wide collaboration"},"content":{"rendered":"
Today\u2019s post about Office 365 ProPlus was written by <\/span><\/span>Stephen Magnuson, manager of IT Infrastructure End User Services <\/span><\/span>at 3M<\/span><\/span>.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n We\u2019re very proud of our record of innovation here at 3M, and we are always striving to improve. 3M takes a very thoughtful approach to our IT deployments, balancing organizational disruption of new technology with user demand and the productivity enhancing potential it can bring. Microsoft delivered the tools to help us make our Office 365 ProPlus rollout fast and easy, even in a large, diverse environment like ours. Just four months after announcing our Office 365 direction to the company we\u2019ve deployed Office 365 ProPlus to more than 60,000 employees and nearly 6,000 mobile devices.<\/p>\n 3M has a culture of creative collaboration that inspires powerful technologies\u2014we continuously work to introduce new products that solve our customers\u2019 challenges. The next great idea can come from anywhere in the company and our organization is most successful when ideas can flow easily, whether that\u2019s between our global R&D centers, or a salesperson sharing a customer process with others in the organization.<\/p>\n After investing in collaboration solutions for more than 10 years\u2014with each team picking their favorite\u2014we had disconnected systems. It was taking too long for us to make the connections we needed internally or with customers, vendors, and distributors. Now, we\u2019ll be able to improve and accelerate those connections by using Office 365 across the organization.<\/p>\n Our Sales and Marketing organizations eagerly anticipated the ability to use Office 365 on multiple devices. They typically use tablets during customer visits, and spend a lot of time converting presentations to PDF files so they display correctly. With Office now available on our mobile devices, salespeople can deliver presentations from any device and not worry about document fidelity.<\/p>\n We faced numerous application compatibility challenges when we moved from Office 2003 to Office 2007, and it took 18 months to complete that upgrade. Office 365 ProPlus provided a very different experience. After piloting the solution with key stakeholders we saw that cross version compatibility was far better than we had experienced in the past. There were a very small number of third-party applications we had to update overall.<\/p>\n We also made our lives easier by choosing to deploy Office 365 ProPlus in a side-by-side configuration with Office 2007. Keeping Office 2007 in place helped overcome the inevitable fear of change.\u00a0 We knew that everyone could keep working no matter what happened during the deployment. We\u2019ll go back and remove Office 2007 in a few months once everyone is comfortable.<\/p>\n When we first learned about Click-to-Run we knew we wanted to use it because it relieves IT of the responsibility for installs and updates and lets users manage them instead. We chose to use the System Center Configuration Manager and a user self-service portal, which let us save bandwidth by deploying from local distribution points while still delivering the streaming advantages of Click-to-Run.<\/p>\n We sent links to 5,000 early adopters across the company, and then began deploying in geographically distributed waves to minimize helpdesk and network impacts in a given region. Deployment was going so well, soon we were sending out 20,000 links per week. The self-service part of the rollout lasted about two months, and 48,000 employees installed Office on their own during that time span seeing up to 10,000 installs per week. After that we began push deployments to the remaining employees.<\/p>\nUnlocking value through collaboration<\/h3>\n
Making application compatibility a non-issue<\/h3>\n
Using self-service for rapid progress<\/h3>\n