Author: Alex Fleck

May 24, 2024

We’re on a mission to transform our human resources systems here at Microsoft. To make it happen, we’re upgrading the way we use analytics and AI. Our digital transformation has been a twofold journey. First, we upgraded our core processes, providing efficient and effective self-service portals for our employees and powerful tools for our HR...

Apr 10, 2024

A profound dining transformation is happening at Microsoft as the company’s employees return to an office that’s evolved into a hybrid workplace. The pandemic has changed the way we work—and with it, the way we eat. Consumer expectations are evolving as people, including employees at Microsoft, get used to seamless, on-demand ordering through mobile applications...

Mar 4, 2024

Imagine an enterprise company with dozens or hundreds of firewalls, each with its own set of policies for keeping corporate networks secure. That was the situation here at Microsoft until our IT teams started using Microsoft Azure Firewall Manager. This platform helped streamline and centralize their control over our large firewall ecosystems. It also cleared...

Jan 24, 2024

In an organization the size of Microsoft, employees need a wide array of tools to accomplish their work. For many, third-party software is part of their toolbox, and that means we need to purchase, organize, and manage software licenses on a massive scale. Robust software asset management is essential for making sure the process is...

Jan 10, 2024

In any given month, Microsoft manages about 1.5 billion royalty transactions related to an estimated nine million products that span more than 3,000 partners, whose relationships are governed by over 5,000 active contracts. That’s a lot of transacting. Through smart data assembly, natural language processing, and a custom Microsoft Teams bot, the engineers on Microsoft’s...

Dec 14, 2023

[Editor’s note: This content was written to highlight a particular event or moment in time. Although that moment has passed, we’re republishing it here so you can see what our thinking and experience was like at the time.] Paperless contract lifecycle management (CLM) suddenly became more important during the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, when schools had...

Oct 26, 2023

Ensuring compliance doesn’t have to be a roadblock—just ask the Microsoft workers’ council in Germany. This group of employee representatives has partnered with their employer, Microsoft, to speed up how the company develops and deploys new products and services to its employees, a story that resonates with customers who have similar challenges at their companies....

Oct 16, 2023

At Microsoft, we do business with an immense number of vendors and suppliers, and many of the services they provide require a statement of work (SOW) contract. Creating, approving, and managing those contracts is an immense task. We developed an automated contract creation tool to simplify this process for our internal users and to streamline...

Apr 20, 2023

[Editor’s note: This content was written to highlight a particular event or moment in time. Although that moment has passed, we’re republishing it here so you can see what our thinking and experience was like at the time.] Managing financial transactions can be a tricky business. When Microsoft employees and external payees run into invoice...

Mar 28, 2023

Responding to site outages at Microsoft used to be very challenging. Large organizations have a lot of moving parts, and when internal sites experience outages and connectivity problems, those moving parts can grind to a halt. Getting things up and running again is priority one. In the past, responding to site outages at Microsoft required...