Need to Reduce Cycle Time for Key Business Process

• Faster employee onboarding
• Enhanced collaboration
• Deeper business insight

Situation

When it comes to providing trusted network security solutions for businesses and consumers, Trend Micro is decidedly a trendsetter. Founded in 1988, the company has consistently delivered industry-leading technologies designed to protect users from malicious software (malware), viruses, and other threats. For example, in June 2010, the Tokyo-based software company became the first to release a solution that automatically detects and scans PCs running in a virtualized environment.

Since the company was founded, Trend Micro’s executives have emphasized two critical values necessary for innovation and long-term success: a belief that change creates opportunity and an appreciation for the power of collaboration. Attention to these core values has served the company well for more than two decades. Trend Micro, which has offices in more than 20 countries, routinely ranks among the largest developers of security software in the world, based on annual sales revenue.

Need to Reduce Cycle Time for Key Business Process

To foster sustained growth, company leaders have redoubled efforts to streamline inefficient business processes. In targeting areas for improvement, executives immediately identified the procedure for distributing IT resources to new hires, which is managed by the company’s Worldwide Support Services office in the Philippines.

Historically, this process required new employees to initiate requests through the company’s intranet. Staff from the Worldwide Support Services office would respond by sending an application form as an attachment in an email message. Once the form was completed and returned, staff would then manually check it for accuracy. Repeated rounds of email messages to communicate changes led to multiple versions of request forms. This inevitably lengthened the process, which could take upward of two weeks to complete. Meanwhile, new employees waited idly for access to the applications, file shares, and other resources they needed to do their jobs. “We wanted to equip employees with the IT tools and access privileges they need from day one to help them maximize productivity,” says Peter Yu, Corporate Business Application Technical Manager at Trend Micro.

Dependence on email communication to fulfill IT resource requests had other limitations. The proliferation of messages and documents occupied storage capacity on email servers. Also, email did not provide a suitable way to handle manager approvals for access to certain restricted resources.

Goal to Simplify, Scale Collaboration Capabilities

Beyond revamping core business processes to improve efficiency, executives wanted to make it easier for employees to share data, insights, and company news. For three years, Trend Micro hosted its corporate intranet on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. During that period, adoption flourished. In fact, its intranet grew to include more than 1,200 subsites and vast amounts of unstructured data. However, the rapidly increasing size of the content database led to intermittent performance problems, including sluggish search response times.

Yet, company leaders wanted to expand team pages, blogs, wikis, and other content, and they were interested in finding new tools to help employees view and exchange information in a more dynamic, interactive way. They also wanted to extend business intelligence capabilities to more people in the organization without adding infrastructure.

To amplify innovation and help Trend Micro keep its competitive edge, executives searched for a software solution that combined scalable document and process management features, rich collaboration tools, and powerful analytics. They also emphasized the ability to use existing components of the solution to rapidly develop new applications.

Solution

After attending the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas, Nevada, leaders from Trend Micro were eager to upgrade to Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. They wanted to take advantage of the enhanced workflow, enterprise content management, and social computing features built into the product, in addition to the flexible services infrastructure it offers for building custom collaboration applications. Trend Micro deployed SharePoint Server 2010 together with Microsoft Office 2010.

Centralized, Automated Workflows

The company prioritized the development of an automated workflow to govern IT resource requests. By taking advantage of the interoperability between Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010—the web and application design program for SharePoint Server 2010—and the Microsoft InfoPath 2010information gathering program, Trend Micro was able to rapidly create web forms tailored to this process. “With SharePoint Designer 2010, we didn’t need to write a single line of code,” says Yu. “We developed the web forms by using built-in tools in InfoPath, and then we simply published the completed forms to SharePoint.”

Trend Micro’s development team then used SharePoint Designer to model and implement workflow that incorporates the InfoPath forms. New employees can now access IT resource request forms on the company intranet and use drop-down menus to quickly enter the necessary information. Completed forms are then automatically routed to managers, regional IT administrators, and staff at the company’s Worldwide Support Services office. To help ensure improved security throughout the process, each step in the workflow can be completed only by authorized personnel based on their roles within the company. To further ensure data integrity, the company uses the Records Management functionality in the solution to centrally store requests in the system database. “Our legal department and internal auditors love being able to locate all of the information in a single record, rather than sorting through archived email messages,” says Yu.

The company looks forward to implementing additional workflows in the coming months. Because the solution offers easy-to-use design tools, the company can develop, build, and adapt workflows with minimal investment. “Trend Micro is a very flexible company; the organization changes very quickly, and we can't use a fixed workflow tool,” says Yu. “Rapid development in SharePoint Server 2010 lets us complete form development work, including workflow and rules, in an average of three to 10 working days after confirming the requirements with the user.”

Personalized Ways to Connect with Colleagues

The company has used SharePoint Server 2010 to make it easier for colleagues around the world to stay connected. In early 2011, the Trend Micro development team extended the My Site feature of the solution to create an application that the company now calls Trend Talk. Two hundred people at Trend Micro currently use this application, which the company deployedin the spring of 2011.

Similar to the popular Facebook social networking utility that many people use outside of work, the tool can be used to post content and links and update colleagues on the status of current projects.

When an employee signs in to the application, the system automatically loads their personal information. From the main screen, employees can access a familiar ”News Feed“ feature, a peer list, keyword tags, and tools for uploading files. As illustrated in Figure 1, employees can also set up personalized news feeds to provide and receive brief updates and recommend content to colleagues. Because all of the information on Trend Talk is tagged, it also serves as a way for staff throughout the company to quickly find colleagues who are experts in particular disciplines.

Flexible Tools for Tracking Performance

Trend Micro takes advantage of the ability to connect to numerous services-based analysis and reporting applications through SharePoint Server 2010. For example, as demonstrated in Figure 2, IT staff used tools in PerformancePoint Services in SharePoint Server 2010 to create dashboards that summarize operational statistics in a visual way. These dashboards help IT leaders track important metrics at a glance, such as the proportional use of different operating systems across the company.

Managers particularly appreciate the option to use different business intelligence tools for different scenarios. For example, they can use Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services to create customized reports from a variety of external data sources, or they can use Microsoft Excel 2010 spreadsheet software together with Excel Services in SharePoint Server 2010 to share refreshable spreadsheets in a browser.

Benefits

By taking advantage of enhanced document management, information sharing, and analysis capabilities, together with tools for quickly developing new collaboration applications, TrendMicro has experienced the following benefits:

• Greater productivity from day one.

Trend Micro used the built-in application design tools in SharePoint Server 2010 to completely revamp and automate its workflow for providing IT resources to new employees. The process, which relied heavily on email communication before, previously required up to two weeks to complete. Now, by managing the process through the use of web forms and workflow procedures on the corporate intranet, staff in the company’s Worldwide Support Services office can fulfill requests within a matter of hours. “By using workflows in SharePoint Server 2010, we can set up employees with the applications and credentials they need on day one, instead of losing weeks of productivity to processing delays,” says Yu.

• Stronger connections, faster answers.The company has made full use of the straightforward, flexible collaboration functionality in SharePoint Server 2010 to offer employees easy ways to share information. For example, employees can use Trend Talk—which builds on the My Site feature of SharePoint Server 2010—to exchange multimedia content and updates with colleagues anywhere in the world. “Trend Talk not only makes getting answers faster, but it’s a lot of fun, which speeds up adoption” says Yu. “Innovation starts with our people, and SharePoint Server 2010 is the key to keeping our people connected and fully engaged in collaborative problem solving.”

• Deeper insight, increased business agility.Through its upgrade to SharePoint Server 2010, Trend Micro benefits from simpler, more cost-efficient access to several powerful analysis and reporting tools from Microsoft, such as PerformancePoint Services and Excel Services. The company has used these applications to create customized reports and data visualization tools, which can then be easily shared across the company to support rapid, well-informed decisions. “We can now create interactive dashboards that give us a much richer picture of business performance and insight into exactly where we need to improve,” says Yu.

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 is the business collaboration platform for the Enterprise and the Internet.

For more information about Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, go to: