How to Collaborate Securely in Microsoft Teams (Case Study)
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Case Study: Singapore Mega Retailer (Anonymous)
The Challenge
The ever-accelerating speed of the retail industry means it is crucial for these companies to be able to securely and quickly collaborate with internal colleagues as well as external vendors across their supply chain.
The technology they sought after needed to provide a stable information platform to enable store managers and their team to have seamless communication and collaboration internally among coworkers, and externally with suppliers, vendors, and customers.
In order to achieve effective and timely communication, the global retail company made the decision to use Microsoft Teams. However, the company’s IT team faced difficulties with deployment, particularly around their unmanaged provisioning and accessibility. This resulted in a need for increased governance functionality.
There are three obstacles that proved to be of the highest importance during this project.
1. Ensuring Secure Collaboration
Being a mega-retailer means there are thousands of people both internally and externally that need to be accounted for when considering the security of content.
Internally, the right information needs to be uploaded and shared in only the right Teams. And external guest access – such as vendors and contractors – must be managed appropriately to prevent lost control over shared content.
2. Maintaining Operational Governance
By replacing the IT team’s task of provisioning Teams to reduce their burden, the appropriate control over that provisioning needs to be set in stone. An enforced lifecycle management had to be implemented to maintain a clutter-free environment and prevent dark data sprawl.
3. Sustainable User Adoption
The company knew this wouldn’t come to fruition if their end-users aren’t onboarded sufficiently to make sure they are empowered to utilize the appropriate Office 365 tools. This needs to be executed well to pull everything together and maximize Office 365’s ROI.
The AvePoint Solution
AvePoint, the accelerator of digital transformation success for global companies and organizations, provided the company with the following solutions for their secure collaboration, governance, and sustainable adoption challenges in Microsoft Teams:
Facilitating Secure Collaboration
Cloud Governance preserves users’ ability to provision Teams while giving the company increased control over the process to ensure user access levels, ownership, security, and settings follow company policy.
This also allows the company to create settings that allow external users only the ability to read, edit, or upload content. External users are also able to access or modify shared content over a temporary period of time.
Maintaining and Scaling Operational Governance
The self-service provisioning functionality for Teams with organization policies being automatically enforced not only mitigates human error, but has resulted in an 80% reduction for the IT team to provision Teams.
This has helped in allowing the organization time to align and mature Teams as well as highlighting strategies for growth.
User Adoption Assistance
To help with platform adoption, AvePoint also provided assistance with the company’s internal communication plan and materials prior to the launch of Teams. This included preparing best practice manuals and training sessions to educate employees on best practices.
Once deployed, Cloud Governance was also able to provide detailed auditing for management to review the platform’s usage and report on ROI.
The Bottom Line
Today, after carefully planned Office 365 application implementation with AvePoint, store managers and their teams can communicate and collaborate with each other and external parties without worrying about security and bothersome permission management, while reducing the burden on IT department. The company aims to work with AvePoint to keep up with fast-evolving Office 365 applications to get the most out of the latest innovations and accelerate their digital transformation journey.
About the Anonymous Retailer
The global retail company operates more than 400 boutiques in more than four continents and has a large presence in Singapore ultimately employing thousands of employees amounting up to over 4,000 user seats within Office 365.
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