Customer Solution Case Study
Gold Mining Firm Deploys Office 365 ProPlus to Reduce Costs, Boost Productivity
Overview
Country or Region:South Africa
Industry:Mining
Customer Profile
Headquartered in Johannesburg, South Africa, Gold Fields Limited engages in the acquisition, exploration, development, and production of gold properties. It employs about 40,000 people worldwide.
Business Situation
Gold Fields wanted to provide the latest version of Microsoft Office to provide new capabilities for employees and to consolidate on the same platform to ease administration.
Solution
Gold Fields evaluated Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus to understand how Office as a service could help it reduce administration and licensing costs while providing the new Office on multiple devices.
Benefits
- Simplify Office deployment and maintenance
- Support a mobile workforce
- Reduce licensing costs
- Improve productivity
Ridwan Jadwat, Infrastructure and Operations Manager, Gold Fields Limited
Gold Fields Limited is a South African gold mining firm. Headquartered in Johannesburg, the company owns and operates mines on several continents including Africa, Australia, and South America. With employees working in different locations around the world, Gold Fields faced a challenge keeping workers on the same version of Microsoft Office. In addition, employee demand to access Office from more than one device was growing. When Gold Fields learned about Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus, the full client version of Office delivered as a service, it decided to deploy the solution to a group of early adopters to evaluate the latest deployment and business productivity capabilities. By using Office 365 ProPlus, Gold Fields believes it can simplify administration, reduce licensing costs, provide support to multiple devices, and improve employee productivity.
Situation
Formed in 1887 and headquartered in Johannesburg, South Africa, Gold Fields Limited engages in the acquisition, exploration, development, and production of gold mines. It holds interests in eight operating gold mines in Africa, Australia, and South America. In addition to the mines, the company also maintains offices in the United States, Canada, and in the Philippines.
At Gold Fields, employees rely on Microsoft Office applications to capture, manage, analyze, and share information, such as mining and financial data, with each other and with business partners. Gold Fields uses Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 for email and some offices use Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for internal collaboration.
Because the workforce at Gold Fields is globally dispersed, the IT team had difficulty tracking the version of Office—Office 2003, Office 2007, or Office 2010—individual employees were using, which made it difficult to maintain and manage updates. “We support about 8,000 employees for everything from desktop applications such as Office to enterprise solutions such as Exchange Server,” says Ridwan Jadwat, Infrastructure and Operations Manager at Gold Fields Limited. “Maintaining consistent versions of software for users geographically dispersed around the world was quite a challenge.” In many cases, the IT staff would send someone to remote sites to physically install Office software. Because they would have to take control of the employee’s PC for a few hours, this install task would disrupt employee productivity.
To help employees be more productive at their jobs, Gold Fields started to support a “bring your own device” policy, but the resulting demand from employees to provide Office for multiple devices also proved to be a challenge. “Employees might be working on a document at the office, and then they want to go outside the office or home and continue working. We supported email connectivity services to multiple devices, but not much beyond that,” explains Jadwat. “In addition, the list of devices we are requested to support grows on a daily basis.”
When Gold Fields learned about the next generation of Microsoft Office, it was interested in deploying the software to provide the latest capabilities and to get employees on the same version, but it was concerned that application compatibility issues could disrupt business. In addition, by deploying the latest release of Office, the company still faced the challenge of how to provide support for a growing number of devices without incurring additional licensing costs. Then the company learned about Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus, the full client version of Office that is delivered as a service to help keep employees on the latest versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, and more.
Solution
To understand how Office 365 ProPlus would work in its environment, Gold Fields decided to select a group of 150 employees to evaluate the service. As a first step, the IT team used the enhanced telemetry tools to see what versions of Office employees were running and what potential compatibility issues they might face. Using the telemetry results, they selected a mix of employees who were using Office 2007 and Office 2010 as early adopters. “The telemetry tools gave us a better idea of how Office is being used across the organization,” says Jadwat.
To deploy Office 365 ProPlus, Gold Fields used Click-to-Run, a streaming and virtualization technology built into Office 365 ProPlus. First, the IT team downloaded Office 365 ProPlus to a local file server to test the deployment. Then they opted to use Microsoft System Center 2012 Configuration Manager to push Office 365 ProPlus to the selected candidates. The employees simply received an email notifying them of the install and the Office install silently streamed in the background while the employees carried on with their work. “Click-to-Run enables our employees to experience a self-sufficient install, with no IT intervention required,” says Jadwat.
To minimize the risk of disruption caused by potential compatibility issues, employees can continue to use older versions of Office side-by-side with Office 365 ProPlus if they have add-ons or macros they need to access for older documents. “We really like the fact that two versions of Office can co-exist gracefully on a single machine,” says Jadwat. “For example, if a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet has a macro that experiences a compatibility issue, employees can open the spreadsheet in an older Excel version and continue working until we resolve the issue.”
Gold Fields also encouraged employees in the early adopter program to install Office 365 ProPlus on multiple devices. “We like the fact that our employees can install Office 365 ProPlus on up to five devices,” says Jadwat. When employees switch devices, they can take advantage of Office roaming settings capabilities to easily access their recently used documents, presentations, and spreadsheets right from the page or slide where they last left off. “Employees can now leave their laptops at the office and continue to work on documents from their home PCs and other devices,” adds Jadwat.
To share documents with employees across the organization, Gold Fields likes SkyDrive Pro. By using SkyDrive Pro, employees can save and access documents in the cloud. They can edit documents offline and synchronize them to ensure they have the latest versions. Employees no longer have to attach documents to email messages or worry about version control. “We especially like SkyDrive Pro for our employees who work in the exploration side of our business, because they go to some pretty remote locations where infrastructure is typically poor,” explains Jadwat. “Whenever they get Internet access, they can access SkyDrive Pro and upload or download the latest version of documents.”
Gold Fields employees also like the new capabilities in Excel. For employees in the Sustainable Development group, who are responsible for quarterly environmental reports, the latest capabilities such as PowerPivot can help them take large amounts of complex data and build simple data models for different audiences.
In the near future, Gold Fields is interested in evaluating other cloud-based services in Microsoft Office 365 including Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Lync Online. The company believes that moving these services to the cloud can help it reduce infrastructure costs and ease administration going forward. “We believe Office 365 will simplify IT, while helping our dispersed employees achieve better access to their productivity tools and information,” says Strini Mudaly, Vice President and Head of IT at Gold Fields Limited.
Benefits
By deploying Office 365 ProPlus, Gold Fields can achieve its goal of having all employees using the same version of Office without increasing administration or worrying about employee disruption from potential compatibility issues with older versions. It can also provide better support for employees working on multiple devices without increasing licensing costs.
Simplify Office Deployment and Maintenance
By subscribing to Office 365 ProPlus and taking advantage of new deployment capabilities like Click-to-Run, Gold Fields can standardize on the latest version of Microsoft Office for all employees. It can also avoid costs and employee downtime by eliminating the need for IT staff to travel to remote locations and take employees PCs away to install Office software. “We are trying to get our employees to be more self-sufficient, and we feel that Office 365 ProPlus takes us one step closer to achieving that goal,” says Jadwat.
Support a Mobile Workforce
Employees can install Office 365 ProPlus on up to five devices. “The ability to install Office 365 ProPlus on multiple devices helps us to embrace mobility as a company and gives employees more flexibility to choose how, where, and when they work,” says Jadwat. In addition, with functionality such as SkyDrive Pro, Gold Fields can ensure that employees can share and access up-to-date documents no matter where they are working.
Reduce Licensing Costs
With user-based licensing, Gold Fields can better support its bring your own device policy. “By subscribing to Office 365 ProPlus, we have the potential to reduce our licensing costs in the long run by leveraging the option of deploying the product on up to five devices per user for the cost of a single Office license,” says Jadwat.
Because the Telemetry tools help Gold Fields understand how employees are using Office, it has a better idea of how to deploy the solution across the organization. “Instead of purchasing the same licenses and deploying the same features across the board, we can better understand how employees are using Office so that we can distribute it in a more cost-effective way,” explains Jadwat.
Improve Productivity
Gold Fields believes that having access to Office 365 ProPlus on multiple devices will help employees to be more productive. In addition, having the ability to store and share documents across the organization by using SkyDrive Pro will also increase productivity—and save time. “Instead of waiting for an attachment to come across email, employees can access the latest versions of documents in SkyDrive Pro,” says Jadwat. “They can also be sure they are collaborating on the same version.”
With Office 365 ProPlus, employees will always have access to the latest capabilities, which will also help them be more productive at their jobs. “Always having the latest features and capabilities in programs such as Excel will benefit everyone, especially our power users who really push new features to their limits to extract maximum benefit,” says Jadwat.
Microsoft Office 365
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